Working Paper: Architectural change in accelerating transitions. Insights from the German energy transition

As transitions accelerate, they often increase in depth and scope. Transition dynamics may go
beyond changes in core technologies to include architectural change at the system level. In this
paper, we study actor preferences for system technologies that underpin different system
architectures. System technologies are important as they can affect the pace and direction of
transitions including system architecture. Our empirical case is the transition in the German
electricity system where actors disagree about how decentralised the system architecture should
become. In electricity, system technologies ensure stable supply by e.g. providing flexibility for
the integration of variable renewable energies. We find that many incumbents mainly prefer
established centralized system technologies but because these are difficult to expand, they
reluctantly accept a role for novel and immature decentralized system technologies. As for
challengers, there are important differences from incumbents in terms of when and to what
extent new system technologies are needed and how they should be supported. We make two
contributions to the literature: 1) we introduce system technology as a concept and use it to
illustrate tensions between the pace and direction of accelerating transitions, and 2) we show
how actor roles and positions become more fluid during acceleration.

The working paper can be found here.