One or many transitions: local electricity experiments in Germany

Abstract

A characterizing feature of the German electricity transition is that it started as a movement arising from the civil society. Initially the movement was directed against nuclear energy and later on turned into a movement favouring decentralized forms of energy production and distribution as well as local control over energy issues. Once these demands found official recognition and regulatory support, a dynamic development ensued in which a host of new actors with new ideas and strategies became involved in the field of electricity generation. Regions, cities and villages experimenting with socio-technical innovations and aiming to implement new concepts developed governance structures under high uncertainty. These governance structures mirror space-specific social, political, technological and economic constellations. Once the old incumbent actors in the field began to falter, both government and electricity providers started to stem the tide of decentralized initiatives, whose dynamic in fact has recently been seriously weakened. In order to help us better understand these developments in a more generic context, the political-cultural theory of strategic action fields as developed by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam will be applied.

Keywords:

• energy transitions
• local initiatives
• case study
• innovators
• theory of strategic action fields

Notes

1. In the following, we will make no distinction between local, urban and regional attempts towards developing plans for energy transitions. The decentralized character of these initiatives, which put them into opposition to the dominating centralized architecture, is the decisive common element considered important for the purposes of this study.

2. The article is based on preliminary empirical results of two ongoing projects. The Helmholtz association and the state government of Baden-Württemberg financed one; the second one is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Education.

3. For the present study, two case studies of citizen wind parks (financed by the Federal Ministry of Research and Education) were done, four case studies on local energy initiatives, two on bio-villages and a structural analysis of 28 bio-village initiatives in Baden-Wuerttemberg were performed within the framework of the Helmholtz Alliance “Future Energy Infrastructures”.