Framework for Analysing National Energy Transitions and Illustration with Respect to Worldwide Expansion of Wind and Solar Power

This paper explores factors which explain the variation of national energy policies and their outcomes. It builds on a framework for analysing national energy transitions as a co-evolution of three interacting systems: (1) energy flows and markets, (2) energy technologies and (3) energy policies. To understand energy policies, it is necessary to see them in the context of resource endowment and depletion (or discoveries), demand growth (or decline), infrastructure aging, and technonogy emergence and diffusion (or inertia). Many contemporaty studies of policy variation abstract from these techno-economic and socio-technical variables and thus arrive at misleading conclusions on the driving and constraining factors of energy policies. This paper first specifies factors that should be taken into account in comparative energy policy analysis and illustrates the importance of these factors with cases of contrasting energy policies in Germany, Japan and the UK. Subsequently, it proceeds with explaining the worldwide expansion of solar and wind power (in 1980-2015), which is widely viewed as driven by national energy policies. Based on socio-technical literature, the expansion of wind and solar power is divided into 'formative' and 'deployment' phases, associated with different political dynamics. We identify dependent variables most appropriate for characterising both phases and trace these variables to the identified explanatory factors. We use case-evidence, set-theoretical methods, survival models, and panel regressions to analyse these relationships. The preliminary results of our analysis indicate that contrary to the common belief, climate change concerns do not play a significant role in explaining the variation in renewable energy policies and outcomes across countries. Instead we identify several major mechanisms behind the observed variations. The following five factors affect the formative stage of wind and solar power expansion: - policy and technology diffusion from core to periphery, especially prominent in highly interconnected systems such as the EU; - different capacity of technology adoption reflected in both income per capita and the overall size of the economy; - the presence of the 'resource curse': a combination of major fossil fuel exports and low governance capacity; - the rate of increase in dependence of the electricity sector on imported fuels (due in large part to depletion of domestic fuel resources); - the presence of a viable nuclear power sector. After the end of the formative phase when wind and solar power use crosses certain thresholds a smaller number of different exploratory factors become relevant. By and large this 'deployment' stage is explained by increasing policy returns and other feedback loops known from both political science and socio-technical studies. In most countries, renewable power still expands slower than the overall demand growth, which means that it only marginally competes with conventional sources (and thus strictly speaking does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions). The rare cases of solar and wind power substituting conventional sources are entirely concentrated in high income countries. Our analysis indicates that in such cases the growth of renewable energy slows, likely because it means phasing out other energy sources, which leads to political resistance.