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Feed-in tariffs in the European Union pp 39–57Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Tariffs, Quotas and the Ideal of Pan-European Harmonisation from 1996 to 2001

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Part of the book series: Progressive Energy Policy ((PEP))

Abstract

This chapter is interested in the period corresponding to the elaboration of the Directive on the promotion of renewable electricity, from 1996 to 2001. It looks at debates about renewable electricity policy at the European Union level as they became more specific: as national renewable electricity policies developed and diversified, attention started to focus on instrument choice. Having described the range of instruments in use, Cointe and Nadaï take the opposition between FITs and TGCs as a vantage point to analyse the Commission’s vision and its discrepancies with national policies. They show how the Commission was guided by an ideal of harmonisation via the market that was not the priority in all Member States. They trace the emergence of similar debates in academic circles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Though feed-in tariffs have been shown to foster competition among manufacturers, and in fact “shift competition from electricity price to equipment price” (Mitchell et al. 2011, p. 55).

  2. 2.

    The IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources notes that “while quotas and tendering systems theoretically make optimum use of market forces, government tendering system in particular have often had a stop & go nature that has not been conducive to stable investment conditions” (Mitchell et al. 2011, p. 56).

  3. 3.

    In the Commission Working Document, static efficiency is defined as the “ability to ensure that electricity is generated and sold at minimum costs” and dynamic efficiency as the “ability to foster innovation , thus, again, driving down costs ” (European Commission 1999, p. 15).

  4. 4.

    Many analysts dismissed this notion that TGCs were any more “market -based” than FITs , recalling that both instruments relied on the creation of artificial and regulated market conditions (Hvelplund 2001; Meyer 2003; Haas et al. 2011). According to Meyer (2003, p. 668), “one (political) problem with the system is that a fixed price level does not conform to traditional market principles.”

  5. 5.

    A tradable quota system had been implemented in the United States in the 1980s, where it was called “Renewable Portfolio System”. Interestingly, it was designed to replace avoided -cost pricing that the Reagan era deregulation had made seem not market-based enough (Lauber 2004).

  6. 6.

    For instance, Denmark shifted from FITs to TGCs in anticipation of the advent of a harmonized TGC scheme like the one that the Commission pushed for.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Béatrice Cointe

  2. CIRED-CNRS (Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement), Nogent-sur-Marne, France

    Alain Nadaï

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  1. Béatrice Cointe
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  2. Alain Nadaï
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Cointe, B., Nadaï, A. (2018). Tariffs, Quotas and the Ideal of Pan-European Harmonisation from 1996 to 2001. In: Feed-in tariffs in the European Union. Progressive Energy Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76321-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76321-7_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76320-0

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