The Socio-Technical Dynamics of Renewable Energy Policies in Germany

Growing environmental concerns and human-caused climate change increase the pressure on policymakers for rapid action to transform how societies convert energy, produce goods, or transport freight. Innovation and technological progress may contribute to such transitions. However, technological change is hard to predict, requires time, and may be laden with political conflicts. Although more sustainable technologies are available, incentivizing demand and deployment are crucial to accelerate transitions. As transformations develop over decades, understanding the temporal dynamics of policies is critical for governance.

In Germany, the renewable energy act incentivizes the deployment of renewable energy technologies by remunerating electricity fed into the common grid. This dissertation assesses how socio-technical developments of solar and wind energy conversion technologies and the renewable energy act interactively shaped each other. Drawing on frameworks such as technological innovation systems, legitimacy, framing, and policy feedback, the contents of 16,485 newspaper articles and additional empirical studies were scrutinized. ... mehrCombining methods from natural language processing, machine learning, and statistics, this thesis develops text models to assess changes in content and sentiment in large corpora over time. Three studies focus on the shifts in media framing of the German renewable energy act, the underlying co-evolution of technological and policy processes, and the development of the legitimacy of wind power.

The results confirm that renewable energy deployment and policy are contested with varying intensity over time. Where change ought to occur, non-linear dynamics of innovation and technology uptake, growing policy costs, economic interests of incumbents, and technology side effects increasingly complicate policymaking over time. The early phases of the renewable energy act were shaped by positive expectations toward renewable energy technologies, which later shifted towards an emphasis on policy costs. The findings highlight the importance of the prosperity of underlying innovation systems as supporters of policy ambition and maintenance over time. However, policy costs and side effects must be managed effectively to withstand increasing contestation. These results may contribute to advancing the successful governance of sectoral transitions likely to unfold over several decades.