TY - CHAP
TI - New Governance Challenges and Conflicts of the Energy Transition: Renewable Electricity Generation and Transmission as Contested Socio-technical Options
AU - Reusswig, F
AU - Komendantova, N
AU - Battaglini, A
T2 - The Geopolitics of Renewables
AB - The emergence of renewable energy sources (RES) has broadened the scope of socio-technical options for energy systems. While the conventional fossil-nuclear system has been a highly centralized one, both technological and in economic respects, RES can be implemented in a highly decentralized manner—but can also fit to the traditional centralized pathway. This new option space is associated with many conflicts. The paper reconstructs one basic conflict by conceptualizing future energy options as a strategic action field with incumbents and challengers as stylized key actors. We illustrate this approach by various cases from Germany, Austria, the Mediterranean, and China. The paper argues against a popular stylization of the strategic action field of RES along the dichotomy of centralized versus decentralized options and sketches a mixed future as the more plausible—and more desirable—one. The paper ends by sketching the design of a global super smart grid as the backbone for such a mixed option.
DA - 2018/01//
PY - 2018
SP - 231
EP - 256
PB - Springer International Publishing
UR - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-67855-9_9
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-67855-9_9
U1 - International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
LA - English
KW - Human Dimensions
KW - Social & Economic Data
KW - Stakeholder Engagement
ER -