Sustaining the German “Energiewende”. The Challenge of Sector Coupling and Policy Integration

From a technical point of view, “sector coupling” or sector integration of energy (i.e. the coupling of electricity, heat/cold and mobility) has been a major topic in recent years (OECD/IEA 2016). The increasing share of power generated from renewable sources and simultaneously arising problems to meet the goals of the energy transition stimulated particularly in Germany a broader debate on proper policies and instruments for the governance of sector coupling (Fraunhofer IWES et al. 2015, Acatech 2017, Fraunhofer ISI et al. 2018). However, in a political science perspective, sector integration causes specific problems that go beyond the technical challenges. While electricity and heat pretty much belong to the same policy field constituting a policy arena established by similar actors and discourses, mobility and traffic represents a different arena established by different actors, institutions and logics. Fritz Scharpf indicates coordination problems arising from the coupling of two different arenas as “interaction” or “integration problems” (Scharpf et al. 1976, Benz et al. 2016). Interaction problems are the most complex types of policy problems, since they require simultaneous territorial and departmental coordination. While the governance of the expansion of renewable energies can be modeled as a comparatively easy-to-solve problem of standard fixation, and grid-expansion merely represents distributional issues, “sector coupling” seem to be the most complex problem type of energy transitions, since it requires “policy integration” among different sectors. The proposed paper intends to give an analytical insight into the debate. First, it classifies the different approaches to sector coupling from a policy integration perspective; secondly, it discusses political and institutional opportunities of and barriers to those approaches; finally, it debates the probability of success of policy strategies and instruments against the background of the institutional context.