Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
On-farm renewable energy
the process in which a novelty becomes newly connected, connected in a new way,
or connected more firmly to a niche or a regime. The further the process of
anchoring progresses, meaning that more new connections supporting the novelty
develop, the larger the chances are that anchoring will eventually develop into
durable links.
These durable links represent long-term connections that eventually lead to regime
change. Key in this description is the iterative process of change - the novelty, niche and
regime are all changed through their interactions. Elzen
et al.
(2012) describe three types of
anchoring: institutional, technological and network (see also Darnhofer, this volume). The
establishment of research and development support for the technological development of
biogas and wind energy production represents economic institutional anchoring: new rules
of practice associated with economic institutions. This process was evidenced in the 1980s,
when agricultural science institutions in Germany started putting a stronger focus on
working with biogas technologies (Umweltbundesamt, 2010), 'professionalizing' the
experiments that had been undertaken at farm level. It was at this point that the discovery
was made that adding organic matter can increase energy output from digestion. The UK,
German (and Danish and Swedish) governments also invested in wind technology research
and development in the 1970s and 1980s (Gipe, 1995). These latter steps can be interpreted
as evidence of technological anchoring: further development of the technologies to enable
commercial electricity production.
The early 1990s saw a shift in policy support from research into market creation for
renewable energy production in the UK and Germany. In the UK, the 1990 Non-Fossil Fuel
Obligation required public electricity suppliers to purchase electricity from non-fossil fuel
sources which included both nuclear and renewable energy. However, this policy had
limited success. In contrast, the Electricity Feed-in Law introduced in Germany created
price supports for renewable energy production. This has led to what Bruns
et al.
(2009)
define as the '1
st
departure phase'
1
of the German biogas development, with ongoing
professionalization and expansion of the spectrum of actors beyond pioneering farmers and
sectoral businesses, to include the waste industry, industrial biogas plant operators and
energy suppliers.
This period also saw the first signs of institutional anchoring within the agricultural
regime: state support for the development and installation of renewable energy technologies
on farms. Although the money involved was considerably smaller than for research and
development in the energy sector, it is important to recognize that the first farm
diversification grants (which included installation of renewable energy) were put in place
by the German and UK governments in the 1980s. These efforts appear largely separate
from actions in the energy sector, suggesting that the two regimes were acting
independently. Whereas the aim of farm diversification grants was to increase farm
household income, research and development activities in the energy sector specifically
targeted the development of renewable energy technologies. Owing to a lack of clear
energy policy from the Czech state, limited investment was made in Czechoslovakia in
1
The original German terms used by Bruns
et al.
(2009) were translated into English by the authors of this
chapter.
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