While international climate policy negotiations very obviously are driven by questions on spatial distributive effects, in German national climate policies this topic seems to be less relevant. The national climate change programs deal with sectors and climate policy targets are set on national level without any explicit spatial relation. Although a federal system, in Germany there is no discussion about coordinated targets for subnational entities; in climate policy, the German Länder only play the role as voluntary and supplementary state actors. Nevertheless, German climate policy induces also spatial impacts, especially in the crucial action field of electricity production. Specific CO2 emissions differ heavily among the Länder, mainly due to the importance of fossil fuel for the electricity production and the importance of energy intensive industries in some Länder. These “high-carbon”-Länder are confronted with potentially costly adaption processes with impacts on the regional economic structure. On the other side other Länder with a high potential for renewable energies may benefit from the strong national supporting scheme for renewable energies. Whereby in other countries, as e.g. Canada, such federal challenges in climate policy result in severe policy blockades, the German climate policy seem to be quiet robust. This surprises insofar, as political science often describes the German cooperative federalism as an institutional framework with only very limited capacities to solve distributive challenges. This paper describes spatial effects on level of the Bundesländer concerning the change of the electricity production system during the last two decades. It analyses which of the Länder are “winners”, which are “losers”, how important the development of the renewable energy capacity for the economy of the specific Länder is and how the allocation of benefits and costs is related to “poorer” and “wealthier” Länder.
