Who is Confronting Whom? Conflicts About Renewable Energy Installations in Germany

In the discussion about the protest against renewable energy installations and the extension of the German grid infrastructure, very often a simplified picture is painted: irrational citizens protest against a decent and well meaning government policy. This is a double simplification. On the one hand, it treats “the state” as something like a unified actor. Any government, however, consists of dozens of competing units and parts. The state is in practice neither a single unified thing, nor a complex machine with many parts , nor an aggregate of many individual wills. It is yet another ecology of competitors , albeit one in which some members have their hands directly on the machinery of government. Issues, policies, and outcomes are tied to one another by social action, not by functional necessity. Citizens on the other hand are embedded in different environments with competing demands – renewable energies one among them. The present paper calls for a more nuanced analysis of conflicts. Sometimes these conflicts are analyzed in terms of the general interest in the development of energy transitions vs. more or less selfish not in my backyard sentiments. Actual conflicts, however, present a more complicated picture, highlighting the impression that there is not “one” transition, but transitions in themselves are contentious, conflict-ridden endeavors and the situation in concrete places where conflicts about EE installations etc. arise, mirrors this impression. The paper will analyze four actual conflicts in the realm of electricity generation and distribution in Germany. The aim of the paper is to show that protest events are not single-issue items but instead they are embedded in longer event chains. The highlighted protest instances also illustrate the point that in the German electricity transition there is not one clear-cut line of conflict, but various conflict lines are overlapping. In some cases in fact the overall outlook of the system of electricity production and distribution is at stake, in other cases the energy issue is used to prolong and re-fight existing conflicts, in still other cases we are mainly dealing with local grievances addressed to the far away authorities. Far from de-railing the electricity transition the conflicts also signal, that the transition has become part of everyday practices and conflicts. None of the conflicts studied is “representative” in any statistical sense, but they show the working of different mechanisms in the conflicts linked to the transition. The landscape issue e.g. is not a uniform one but plays out differently and is of varying importance in the individual constellations. Thus it is also obvious that the protest events have not been randomly selected, but with the aim in mind to highlight different protest constellations.