Adoption and diffusion of renewable energy technologies: Influence of the policy mix in the manufacturing industry

Katharina Mattes, Simon Müller, Angela Jäger, Nadezda Weidner and Ute Weißfloch

No S6/2014, Working Papers "Sustainability and Innovation" from Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI)

Abstract: Rising energy prices and political goals which address climate change, such as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, increase the importance of using renewable energies and technologies for generating these. Since the manufac-turing industry is one of the major energy consumers in Germany, this paper focuses on the diffusion of renewable energy technologies to generate power in the manufacturing industry. Using data from the German Manufacturing Survey 2012 for 1,594 firms, we analyse the relation between the usage of renewable energy technology and firms' characteristics, also accounting for structural de-terminants. In addition, the reasons for the decision to use these technologies and, in particular, the relevance of the political framework are examined. Our findings show that the producers of end-consumer goods are more likely to use renewable energy technologies compared to other manufacturing firms. The availability of resources plays a substantial role, whereas the energy intensity of the firm is less important for the introduction of renewable energy technologies. When considering the chosen reasons for adoption, firms mentioned most fre-quently that they anticipate rising energy prices. The policy mix, however, is less often mentioned and mostly together with other reasons.

Keywords: renewable energy technologies; manufacturing industry; technology adoption; diffusion of innovations; quantitative analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-reg and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/97267/1/786493453.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:fisisi:s62014

DOI: 10.24406/publica-fhg-296870

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers "Sustainability and Innovation" from Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().