Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? Decarbonisation and Energy Diversification Approaches of Polish State-Owned Enterprise in the Electricity Sector in Light of Energy Governance Co-Ordination Strategies and Instruments

To this point, the majority of research on the ‘least climate ambitious’ EU Member State Poland (Skjærseth 2018) has concentrated mainly on questions related to norm diffusion and Europeanization, trying to explain in particular why Poland opposes the ambitious European Union (EU) climate agenda and an energy transformation does not seem to happen (see e.g. Ancygier 2013, Jankowska 2011, 2012, 2017; Ancygier and Jankowska 2017; Skjærseth, J.B. et al. 2016; Skjærseth 2018). Yet with an increasing lack of local acceptance, high cost to maintain, rise of heavy air pollution in many cities from coal as well as the growing problem that in the near future Polish coal power plants will not meet EU environmental standards and need to be shut down, the future role of Poland’s number one energy carrier is becoming increasingly ambiguous. Polish dialogue on energy issues has been based mainly on the elitist model (Stankiewicz 2014; Wagner 2014; Świątkiewicz-Mośny and Wagner 2014; Wagner, Grobelski, Harembski 2016) with favouring opinions and attitudes of experts, politicians, and government, whose discourse is strongly economized, with the perspective of sustainable development being marginalized. Hence, decarbonisation of the electricity sector does not seem to be vital option for Poland. The Ministry of Energy has responded to these challenges by promoting instead the idea of sustaining the coal industry as it ensures energy independence and security, as well as increasing the diversification of the power mix by different energy carriers. This increasing use of natural gas coming from Russia, which in turn has given rise to the energy dependency rate, has been, however, observed critically in Poland (e.g. Brodacki 2017; Judge and Maltby 2017). The potential role of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) in both of these debates has been actively hindered by e.g. substantial changes in the legal framework (Sokołowski 2017). It seems that decarbonisation and energy diversification are treated here as mutually exclusive approaches in Poland to deal with its inevitable transition of the energy system. Given that energy transitions are a multilevel task, which is entailing the distribution of competences between different governmental levels, which in turn need to be co-ordinated, this paper aims to investigate the potential differences in the strategies of the national energy governance by analysing the co-ordinated energy structures with regard to the (a) decarbonisation and (b) energy diversification strategies in the Polish electricity sector. The key argument is that different co-ordination strategies and instruments are used for the different approaches and its goals etc. Previous research thereby hints that Poland has a highly centralized energy system with a high level of paternalism in decision-making (Tomjałojć 2008) and a state-led governance approach, which is to say that “[g]overnments are the primary actors, not only involved in regulating market conditions, but also exercising substantial influence and control over the actions of market participants” (Judge and Maltby 2017: 184f).