Europeanisation and Politicisation: France, Germany, Poland and the UK’s Differing Paths to Technology Specific Renewables Support Mixes

France, Germany, Poland and the UK are required to act in line with similar EU policies, but they initiated renewable electricity support schemes at different times, had diverging initial schemes and experienced varying degrees of politicization. Still, they have ended up with quite similar renewables support mixes: feed-in premiums awarded through competitive tendering procedures for large scale-projects, combined with fixed feed-in support for small-scale projects. This support scheme mix is far more technology specific than other possible designs, such as electricity certificates, renewable portfolio standards or investment support. This paper applies a multi-field policy assessment approach to answer the question: why have the four countries so similar support scheme mixes? First, all countries are largely in line with the European Commission’s state aid guidelines from 2014, but they have more technology specific support mixes than recommended by the Commission. The UK adopted its scheme rather independently from the EU and Poland used the shift in EU steering as an opportunity to change its support mix, even though its certificate scheme was largely in line with the new EU rules. Germany adjusted their support mix partly because of EU pressure after 2012. This enabled the EU to adopt the new state aid guidelines in 2014; the causal relationship ran in both directions. In France, we see a clear effect on EU steering, particularly after the Court of Justice in 2012 ruled that the French support schemes fell under the definition of state aid in the Treaty. Second, developments within the organizational fields underpinned the changes we see in support scheme mixes in the UK, Germany and Poland. In UK, a shift away from market thinking within dominant corporations and the ministry in question underpinned adoption of the more technology specific ‘contracts for difference’. Germany moved in the other direction: increased importance of market thinking and increased structural power of the Ministry of Economics underpinned more market exposure and weaker technology specificity. In Poland, the field is dominated by large coal producers and privatization made them more influential, bolstering them to hinder development of stable and predictable renewables support practices. The French organizational field is dominated by the EDF, and while this explains why the country early on adopted tendering it cannot explain the high technology specificity. Third, renewables have been highly politicized in Germany, and shifts in political steering is key to understand renewables support development in this country. Political steering has only been important at a few rare moments in the three other countries, but this contribute to explain the feed-in support for small-scale renewables. The paper concludes that Europeanization contributes to explain some of the similarity across the four country, but the EU has influenced the countries in differing ways and at differing times. In order to understand the similarity in policy output we must also consider domestic explanations. The discussion about how to design renewables support scheme mixes is not settled. Thus we may expect future changes in the four countries as well as at the EU level.