New Debate About the Harmonization of the EU’s Support Instruments for Renewables and Binding targets’ Relevance?
How to support renewables is a subject of constant discussion at European level. The first initiatives to promote renewables at the European level goes back to the 1990s. In 2001, the European Union (EU) adopted a framework – Directive 2001/77/EC – for the promotion of electricity from renewable energy sources (RES). That former scheme has been replaced by Directive 2009/32/EC. As a new feature, the latter Directive contains for the first time binding targets in the share of renewable energies. The requirement for binding targets is derived by empirical results. Significantly, in 2010, when renewable energy national action plans were submitted, only 18% of the electricity was renewable, while 21% represented the achievable EU-wide target. With regard to implementing the political programs for supporting renewables, the EU has put forward the criteria of “harmonization” and “binding targets”. Currently, the main focus is already on the period beyond 2020, which leads to the significance of harmonization in combination with binding targets.
Initially, the academic as well as the policy debate about the harmonization of support schemes to promote renewable energy sources (RES) appeared in the 1990s and is an issue of permanent examination. In the late 1990s the question was raised about how to create the best support systems (“best practice”) for the development of renewable energy sources for electricity generation (RES-E), linked to effective and efficient support mechanisms. In this context, it has been discussed whether European harmonization is beneficial. Over time the importance of factors with regard to harmonization has varied: (1) concentrating on economic advantages of harmonization (e.g. an EU-wide quota system such as tradable green certificates (TGC)) or feed-in tariffs – ca. 2000-2005; (2) considering a wider range of different support schemes, principally to potential advantages and disadvantages, both in comparison and in conjunction with harmonization (i.e. cost-efficient technologies, dynamically efficiency and effectiveness) – ca. 2005- 2010. During that time and continuing today, research interest focuses on important differences between electricity markets and regulatory regimes at the level of the Member States, while affecting the implementation of a harmonized support scheme approach. The Commission´s current position and its policy of stimulating optimisation and cooperation by coordination is the scope of interest of this study.
Another categorization of these debates has been offered by Gephart et al., focusing on the political debate on harmonizing support schemes for RES-E: (1) calls for harmonization – ca. 1996-2001; (2) harmonization on hold – ca. 2001-2007; (3) the debate on trade in guarantees of origin – ca. 2007-2008; and (4) facilitating coordination and cooperation – ca. 2009-2012.
The current Directive 2009/28/EC on the promotion of renewable energy sources has introduced cooperation mechanisms to allow Member States to fulfill their RES targets by cooperating with other countries. This article is aimed at investigating the question about the current weight given to harmonization in the Directive.
| Copyright: | © Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH | |
| Quelle: | Issue 04/2013 (Dezember 2013) | |
| Seiten: | 14 | |
| Preis inkl. MwSt.: | € 41,65 | |
| Autor: | Ulf Roßegger  | |
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