German Efforts to Shape European Renewable Energy Policy

The paper demonstrates how Germany strove to shape the European Union’s emerging policies on renewable energy.  We argue that German decision makers were motivated by three factors.  First, they were influenced by a broad consensus in their own country about the desirability of renewable energy, and believed the solutions that worked for Germany would also work for the entire European Union.  Second, Germany sought to protect the regulatory innovations it had developed by promoting those same regulations at the European level.  Third, by establishing a European system that resembled its own, German decision makers sought to give its own entrepreneurs in the renewable sector a competitive edge in the broader European market.  We demonstrate this argument with a process tracing of the development of 2009 Directive on Renewable Energy Sources (RES).