When and How to Support Renewables?—Letting the Data Speak - Green Energy and Efficiency: An Economic Perspective - page 287

c purposes 2 during the war-speci rst and second world wars. The oil crises in the

1970s brought about substantive programmes for RD&D of photovoltaic cells and
wind turbines in Europe and the US, as one tool to reduce dependence from Arab
oil suppliers and shielding Western economies from high and volatile oil prices.
The argument of renewables as a means to reduce import-dependency reappeared in
the European public debate with the Ukrainian Russian and Belarus-Russian ' gas

-

wars and the increasing oil and gas prices in the 2000s. With the Club of Rome

report in 1972, the narrative on the

'

nite nature of energy resources received high
public attention. The argument became somewhat side-lined in the public debate in
the phase of low resource prices in the 1980s but re-emerged with the '

debate in the 2000s. It can be found as one rationale for public support for
renewable energy technologies in numerous public documents. One side-bene

' peak oil

t
claimed for renewables is that, by replacing power production in fossil plants, they
reduce pollution (NOx, SOx, VOCs, etc.) that has negative health and/or envi-
ronmental externalities. 3 Since the 1970s, the awareness of anthropogenic climate
change increased in the public debate. It culminated in the 1996 Kyoto Conference
in which most developed countries committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The International Panel of Climate Change (IPPC) reports reiterate that containing
global temperature increase requires a reduction of emissions from fossil fuels
while the baseline scenario expects increasing emissions. Consequently, massive
public support for renewable energy technologies was rolled out to replace existing
fossil plants by yet uncompetitive renewable units in the short term and/or to reduce
the costs of renewable energy technologies units to make them competitive in the
long term. By the late 1990s the outlined narratives indicated that a growing market
for renewable energy technologies will emerge. To anticipate this development,
economic policy makers suggested supporting domestic renewable energy tech-
nologies in order to gain a competitive edge in this growing

eld (i.e. industrial
policy). Furthermore, demand side polices in order to mitigate the economic crises
of the 2000s envisaged public investments in renewable energy technologies.
Consequently, industrial and macro-economic policies became a further rationale
for supporting renewables. Finally, the nuclear accidents of Chernobyl (1986) and
Fukushima (2011) undermined the public acceptance of nuclear as a source of clean
energy in some countries, making renewables the only acceptable source (Table 1 ).
So we conclude that several different rationales have been used to justify past
and present support for renewable energy technologies. 4

2 E.g. Ethanol production from potatoes for fuelling German rockets or wind power for decen-
tralised electricity production.
3 One example: http://www.bmu.de/ leadmin/bmu-import/ les/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/
ee_innovationen_energiezukunft_bf.pdf (BMU 2011, p. 13).
4 Most of the outlined reasons can be phrased as market-failure and hence a sensible case for
public intervention can be constructed. See for example [ 12 ], p. 83ff).