Reframing renewables: Analysing the effect of energy security frames on policy-making for EU energy policy

There is by now a burgeoning literature on the link between crises and EU policy-making. In recent years, the analytical focus has expanded from how the EU responded to (individual) crises to how these successive crises have shaped the way in which decisions and policies are made. This ‘crisisification’ has transcended crisis-related policy areas and is also permeating more regular and sometimes deeply technical areas of policy-making (Rhinard, 2019). This paper studies the crisisification of policy-making in detail through a case study of the EU renewable energy policy-making process. In 2022, negotiations on the revision of the RED III as part of the Fit-for-55 package were ongoing when Russia invaded Ukraine. As a result, the focus of EU renewable energy policy broadened from addressing climate change to addressing the acute energy crisis by becoming independent from Russian energy supplies. The revision of the RED became part of the EU’s response to the energy crisis. Both short-term measures, such as an emergency regulation on permitting for renewables, and longer term measures, such as an upgrade of the overall renewable energy target for 2030, were proposed as part of REPowerEU. We use embedded process tracing to analyse how EU and national actors managed the policy-making process on renewable energy. We reconstruct the decision-making from June 2021 to June 2023, based on intensive cooperation with insiders from the EU institutions and national ministries. The paper assesses how the policy-making process changed, once renewable energy became part of an immediate horizontal crisis response. By doing so, we contribute to the literature on the development of EU energy policy in times of crisis. Whereas others have analysed the content of the revised RED (Buzogány et al., 2023), we focus on how the policy-making process was changed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Additionally, our article feeds into the literature on crisisification by unpacking how generic elements of crisisification, including increased urgency, the use of crisis frames and the increased involvement of high-level actors and horizontal units, actually worked in one key issue area.