News

Together with Allan Dahl Andersen, Jochen Markard and Magnus Korpås, Prof. Dr. Dierk Bauknecht recently published
a new article on "Architectural change in accelerating transitions: Actor preferences, system architectures, and flexibility technologies in the German energy transition".

Read the full article here.

Together with the Constructor University Bremen / Bremen Energy Research and the Öko-Institut, we are working on this project funded by the Stiftung Energieforschung Baden-Württemberg.
In the transformation of the energy system, numerous coordination problems arise between different actors. The central goal of the project is the development of adaptation options for the incentive regulation of the grid operators in order to solve coordination problems by considering the whole system approach. The starting point are concrete use cases relevant to practice. These cases characterize a coordination problem between two or more actors, e.g. the coordination of network expansion between gas and electricity network operators.

A new working paper by Sarah Olbrich and Dierk Bauknecht explores System Building and the Third Phase of Transitions.

Sustainability transitions occur in different phases: first, the emergence of new innovations, second, the acceleration of innovations, and third, the stabilisation of a new regime. While the processes of the first and second phase are well-described, comparatively little attention has been paid to the third phase. With the help of a literature review building on theories of socio-technical transitions as well as insights from the energy transition case in Germany, this paper introduces system building as a concept that accounts for the characteristics and challenges in the third phase. System building does not merely take place in the niche sphere, but asks for restructuring dynamics in the existing regime as well. It involves the institutionalisation of innovations, the alignment of old and new system elements as well as an interaction between old and new regime actors.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4170503

Together with Hartmut Fünfgeld, Sarah Olbrich published an article about

“Energy justice in wind energy development –Strengthening local acceptance through financial participation?”

Onshore wind energy development is often delayed or even prevented by local resistance. Against this backdrop, the authors discuss financial participation as a measure to promote local acceptance by positively influencing the perceived experience of justice. Building on the concept of energy justice, this paper investigates the extent to which different forms of financial participation are suitable for better distributing costs and benefits, creating opportunities for participation, and examining who can participate financially. In addition to a comprehensive literature review, interviews were conducted with wind turbine planners and operators. These show that stakeholders engage in financial participation to different degrees across different projects and that the preferred form of participation varies from one region to another. Moreover, no model of financial participation appears to be suited to address all dimensions of energy justice, as all models are characterised by certain advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, the availability of financial participation options alone is unlikely to increase local acceptance. Such options can, however, be effective when combined with other measures to increase acceptance.

doi: https://doi.org/10.14512/rur.150

The Chair of Sustainability and Transitions Research is represented with two full paper contributions at the conference "International Sustainability Transitions" (IST): "Energy sector integration: Delineating the policy mix for the case of Germany" and "Decentralized energy futures II: pathways and lock-ins towards emerging new logics of energy-system organization".

This year's conference is themed "Sustainability Transitions in a Global Context". Further information on the conference and registration can be found here.