The German energy transition as a regime shift

Sebastian Strunz

Ecological Economics, 2014, vol. 100, issue C, 150-158

Abstract: In this paper, I use the resilience framework to interpret the project of transforming the German energy system into a renewable energy sources (RES)-based system, the so-called Energiewende, as a regime shift. This regime shift comprises several transformations, which are currently altering the technological, political and economic system structure. To build my argument, I first sketch how technological, political and economic developments reduced the resilience of the conventional fossil-nuclear energy regime and created a new RES-regime. Second, I depict recent changes in German public discourse and energy policy as the shift to the RES-regime. Third, I highlight the challenges involved with increasing the resilience of the RES-regime. In particular, sufficient resilience of the electricity transmission grid appears to be crucial for facilitating the transformation of the whole energy system.

Keywords: Energy system; Energy transition; Regime shift; Renewable energy sources; Resilience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (82)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000342
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:100:y:2014:i:c:p:150-158

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.01.019

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().