•First attempt to analyze the evolution of policy mixes in a larger-n study.•Propose ‘balance’ as a new policy mix characteristic.•Conceptualize policy mix design features, linking policy design and ...mix literatures.•Countries’ policy mix dynamics vary strongly regarding some variables.•Discuss implications of our findings for future policy mix research.
Complex societal or environmental problems require fast and substantial socio-technical transitions. For instance, in the case of climate change, these transitions need to take place in the energy, transport and several industry sectors. To induce and accelerate such transitions, numerous policy interventions are required, which interact with each other in policy mixes. While several conceptual studies on policy mixes have been published recently, there is very little empirical research apart from single case or small-n studies. It has been prominently argued that the debate about policy mixes has reached an impasse partly due to this lack of empirical work. This paper addresses this gap by providing a first analysis of the temporal dynamics of complex policy mixes. To do so, we develop a conceptualization and measurement of policy mix balance across instrument types as well as policy mix design features (in the form of intensity as a general and technology specificity as a technology-focused design feature). This allows us to answer the question how temporal dynamics of policy mixes differ between countries regarding their balance and design features. Our measurement approach is developed bottom-up, i.e., policies are assessed individually and then aggregated systematically at the policy mix level. This enables overcoming the ‘dependent variable problem in the study of policy change’, i.e., the problem of measuring policy output. More specifically, we develop a comparative dataset of 522 renewable energy policies in nine OECD countries. Our analysis shows that countries’ policy mix dynamics vary strongly regarding some variables (e.g., technology specificity) but less regarding others (e.g., balance). As a validity check, we also test the effects of these mix dynamics on policy outcome in the form of renewable energy technology diffusion. We reflect our findings in light of the theoretical debates around policy mixes and policy design and discuss how our results provoke an agenda for the new generation of research on policy mixes. We specifically discuss avenues for future research with a particular focus on the ‘politics of policy mixes’.
Low-carbon energy technologies (renewable energy and energy efficiency) are considered essential to achieve climate change mitigation goals, so a rapid deployment is needed. However there is a ...significant financing gap and many policymakers are concerned that investment for the large-scale deployment of low-carbon technologies will not materialise quickly enough. State investment banks (SIBs) can play a key role in closing this finance gap and leverage additional private finance. Based on 52 interviews, this paper presents empirical evidence on the role of three SIBs in addressing the barriers to financing low-carbon energy projects; the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) in Australia, the Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau (KfW) in Germany and the Green Investment Bank (GIB) in the UK. We investigate the activities and financial instruments offered by SIBs and compare these to the need for such from low-carbon developers when sourcing finance. Findings show that aside from capital provision and de-risking, SIBs take a much broader role in catalysing private investments into low-carbon investments, including enabling financial sector learning, creating trust for projects and taking a first or early mover role to help projects gain a track record.
•The role of State Investment Banks (SIBs) is assessed.•Australia's CEFC, Germany's KfW and the UK's GIB are investigated.•SIBs take a broader role than capital provision and de-risking to mobilise finance.•SIBs take an educational role to enable financial sector learning.•SIBs signal trust and produce track records to crowd-in private finance.
ABSTRACT Ground-based astronomy is unavoidably subject to the adverse effect of atmospheric turbulence, a.k.a. the seeing, which blurs the images and limits the achievable spatial resolution. For ...spectroscopic observations, it leads to slit or fibre-injection losses, since not all photons distributed over the extended seeing disc can be captured. These losses might have a very substantial impact on the overall efficiency of a spectrograph and are naturally highly variable. Assessing the fibre-injection losses requires accurate information about the image quality (IQ) delivered by the telescope to the instrument over the course of the observations, which, however, is often not directly available. ESPRESSO provides acquisition and field-stabilization images attached to the science data and thus offers the opportunity for a post-processing analysis. Here, we present a novel method to infer the IQ profile and fibre-injection losses from the integrated field-stabilization images, utilizing the spill-over light that does not get injected into the fibre. We validate these measurements against the IQ observed in the acquisition images and determine that our method delivers unbiased estimates with a scatter of 0.11 arcsec for the FWHM of the profile and $15~{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ in terms of fibre-injection losses. This compares favourably to the estimates derived from either the differential image motion monitor or the telescope guide probe sensors and therefore represents a valuable tool to characterize the instrument efficiency and to correct raw spectra for fibre-injection losses.
•Integrates finance into multi-level perspective, building on evolutionary economics.•We argue finance is a regime by itself, interacting with all other regimes.•Financial policy interventions can ...fit and conform the technology niche.•Financial policy interventions can stretch and transform the financial regime.•Fitting-and-conforming niche can result in stretching-and-transforming regime.
Any major socio-technical transition requires a fundamental re-direction of financial capital from incumbent to new technologies and practices. While the transitions literature conceptually covers financial markets, the role of finance is marginalized and has scarcely been analysed empirically. To address this gap, here we build on the multi-level perspective (MLP), which considers financial markets as part of the existing regime. We argue that the role of finance is highly relevant for the niche-regime interaction: Redirecting finance towards new niche technologies requires that either the niche is fit for and conforms to the financial regime's expectations or the financial regime is stretched and transformed in order to accept and finance niche technologies. Based on 56 interviews, we identify factors that determine interactions between the financial regime and technology niches: these include acceptable risk and transaction size, an abundance of knowledge and heuristics in both the regime and niche, and an extensive, existing industry network. We further analyse how State Investment Bank (SIB) interventions in Germany, the UK and Australia, aimed to mobilise private finance into low-carbon project development, affect the interaction between the technology niche and financial regime, i.e. whether they resulted in fitting-and-conforming the technological niche for the financial regime or stretching-and-transforming the financial regime. Our results point to several important effects of SIB interventions, with most effects fitting the niche to the regime. However, we also detect effects that stretch and transform the financial regime – through evolutionary processes. Importantly, some effects occur as a consequence of the primary effects. Based on our findings we discuss policy implications on how to accelerate transitions through policies aiming at finance as well as theoretical insights gained through our analysis.
•This study reviews the effectiveness of policies for renewable energy investments.•We analyse the impact of policies on investment risk and investment return.•We separate the effect of policy design ...elements on investment risk and return.•The study has important policy implications for a privately financed energy transition.
With the urgency of climate change, and billions spent globally on renewable energy (RE) support policies, it is crucial to understand which policies are effective. Substantial scholarly research on RE deployment policies has been carried out over the last two decades, resulting in inconclusive findings regarding the effectiveness of mobilizing private finance. Here, we take a novel perspective and review 96 empirical studies concerning the impact of policies on two key investor decision metrics: investment risk and investment return. Only if both metrics correspond to the investors’ expectations are they willing to engage in RE projects. First, our rigorous literature review shows that effective policies address risk and return simultaneously. Second, we find that generic instrument design features, such as credibility and predictability (continuous evaluation and monitoring), considerably impact investment risk. A more focused analysis of the specific design elements of feed-in tariffs, auctions and renewable portfolio standards reveals that these instruments are most effective when they are designed in such a way that they reduce RE project risk while increasing return. We distil important implications for policymakers who aim to foster renewable energy and clean technologies more broadly.
•Policies can face tradeoffs between minimizing costs and creating local industries.•We explore how tradeoffs are managed in Mexico and South Africa's policy designs.•Distinct development logics led ...to different renewable energy auction designs.•Calibrations of policy instruments can be a key determinant of policy outcomes.•Well-calibrated local content requirements can help foster local industry.
Green industrial policies around renewable energy (RE) are growing increasingly prevalent in emerging economy contexts as a means to foster low-carbon industrialization pathways. However, policymakers often face a tradeoff in their policy designs. In this paper, we focus on the tradeoff between minimizing the cost of low-carbon energy generation to fuel traditional input-intensive industrialization strategies, and implementing potentially costly measures to build local industries around low-carbon energy technologies. Specifically, we utilize the cases of Mexico and South Africa to investigate how each country’s distinct prioritization of these two objectives led to a divergence of their RE auction designs and outcomes. Specifically, using data on the involvement of local and foreign actors in Mexican and South African RE projects, policy documents, and interviews with public and private stakeholders in the two countries, we show how each country’s policy design shaped RE market and bid price developments, and the formation of local RE value chains. We find that the prioritization of low-cost RE generation can result in a greater reliance on existing foreign value chains and capital, without building the local capabilities that could result in greater long-term benefits for the market. We further discuss the implications of our results for policymakers, focusing on providing recommendations for RE industrial policy design in general, and the calibration of local content incentives in particular.
In future electricity systems with a high share of intermittent renewable power generation, battery technologies have the potential to support power quality and security. The growing scientific ...literature on batteries reflects the high attention that currently rests on these technologies. This paper reviews the existing literature on lifecycle costs of batteries in stationary applications. The primary result of this review is that, despite the current high degree of variance in technological and economic battery data, a systematic assessment of the underlying uncertainty is lacking. The present paper addresses this disparity with an investigation of the impact of uncertainty in input parameters on lifecycle costs of four battery technologies across six electricity system applications. Based on input data collected from literature and via expert interviews, a probabilistic techno-economic model was built that calculates lifecycle costs and systematically addresses uncertainty in input parameters by applying a Monte Carlo simulation. The main conclusion of this paper is that the present uncertainty in cost and technical parameters of batteries exceeds by far the differences in lifecycle costs across technologies. For most electricity storage applications, the absolute differences in mean lifecycle costs across technologies are negligible compared to the uncertainty ranges of the mean lifecycle costs. Therefore, a competition still exists between the four analyzed battery technologies and so far a leading technology has yet to emerge in any of the investigated applications.
Battery storage is generally considered an effective means for reducing the intermittency of electricity generated by solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. However, currently it remains unclear when and ...under which conditions battery storage can be profitably operated in residential PV systems without policy support. Based on a review of previous studies that have examined the economics of integrated PV-battery systems, in this paper we devise a simulation model that investigates the economic viability of battery storage for residential PV in Germany under eight different electricity price scenarios from 2013 to 2022. In contrast to previous forward-looking studies, we assume that no premium is paid for solar photovoltaic power and/or self-consumed electricity. Additionally, we run the model with a large number of different PV and storage capacities to determine the economically optimal configuration in terms of system size. We find that already in 2013 investments in storage solutions were economically viable for small PV systems. Given the assumptions of our model, the optimal size of both residential PV systems and battery storage rises significantly in the future. Higher electricity retail prices, lower electricity wholesale prices or limited access to the electricity wholesale market add to the profitability of storage. We conclude that additional policy incentives to foster investments in battery storage for residential PV in Germany will only be necessary in the short run. At the same time, the impending profitability of integrated PV-storage systems is likely to further spur the ongoing trend toward distributed electricity generation with major implications for the electricity sector.
•We combine technology-transfer/catching-up with technology life-cycle literature.•We derive typology differentiating technologies along their capability requirements.•We discuss four cases: ...small/micro hydro, wind turbines, solar PV and electric cars.•We propose heuristic to anticipate deployment policies industry localization effects.•We derive recommendations for green-growth strategies and international support.
National ‘green growth’ strategies, which aim at decoupling economic development from adverse environmental impacts, have become a new paradigm for policymakers in developing countries. Many green growth strategies are based on policy instruments designed to incentivize the domestic deployment of relatively mature clean technologies and aim at fostering the formation of a local industry to develop and produce these technologies. While the empirical evidence on the localization effect of such policies in developing countries is mixed, there is a dearth of research systemically analyzing how differences between technologies affect patterns of localization, which could explain the observed variance. We address this gap and develop a typology which distinguishes four types of technologies requiring different types of capabilities. We do so by combining insights from the literature on technology transfer and catching-up of industries with insights from the literature on patterns of innovation across the technology life- cycle. We apply this typology to the case of low-emission development strategies and four exemplary low-carbon technologies, namely small and micro hydro power, wind turbines, electric cars, and solar cells, in order to analyze capability requirements, innovation patterns, and the effect of past deployment policies on industry localization. We synthesize these case studies and derive a heuristic to anticipate the localization effects of deployment policies for different types of technologies in countries with varying income levels. We argue that the heuristic can serve as starting point for policymakers aiming at clean technology industry localization. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible technology-specific green growth strategies for developing countries with different income levels and for international institutions supporting green growth.
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