Agriculture Reference
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either agriculture or renewable energy production sectors during this period. Anaerobic
digestion technology continued to be used primarily for waste-management.
Whereas anchoring was occurring at national levels in Germany and the UK, the Czech
Republic thus remained in a pioneering phase, with one of the first digesters installed on a
farm in the mid-1990s. The installed technology failed, threatening the local environment,
and received heavy public criticism (Klastr Bioplyn, 2013). Two of the regional study sites
were also entering the pioneering phase, with individual turbines established on a few farms
in Aberdeenshire in the 1980s, and experimentation with biogas in Wendland -Elbetal.
While the first digester set up in 1995 was successful in Wendland-Elbetal, in the
Aberdeenshire case, the turbines were abandoned in response to technical failures.
Translation phase (late 1990s)
Political action taken to address climate change in the late 1990s represents a 'translation'
of the original purposes of biogas and wind energy technologies, from waste management
and energy production solutions, to a means of addressing climate change
2
. The European
Commission published a White Paper in 1997 that set the first target for renewable energy
source (RES) utilization in the EU; the contribution of RES to the gross inland consumption
of (primary) energy was to increase from 5.4% in 1997 to 12% in 2010 (European
Commission, 1997). The subsequent directives (Renewable Electricity Directive
2001/77/EC and the Biofuels Directive 2003/30/EC) set indicative targets for the RES share
in the electricity and transport sectors in 2010. The RES share in electricity co nsumption
should increase to at least 21% in the EU-27, broken down into targets for individual
Member States (Kleßmann
et al.
, 2011). In response to the new directives, Germany
adopted a renewable energy law in 2000 that secured feed-in tariffs for 20 years for
renewable energy and obligated grid operators to connect to renewable energy plants
(
Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz
- EEG). In 2000, the UK Government announced a target of
10% of electricity to be produced from renewable sources by 2010. In contrast, the Czech
Government continued its support for conventional energy sources, with a clear priority of
finishing construction of the nuclear powerplant JET, which started to operate in 2002.
As such, the European directives created a 'window of opportunity' for renewable
energy development in the UK, and as will be seen in the next section, latterly in the Czech
Republic. However, Germany had already accelerated production through a series of
national and regional measures. As early as 1997, the regional government in the
Wendland-Elbetal region set the goal of meeting 100% of primary regional energy demand
locally through regionally produced renewable energy and energy savings. There is no
evidence of regional activity relating to renewable energy in the Vysočina or Aberdeenshire
case study areas during this period.
Take-off phase (early 2000s)
In all three countries, policy measures undertaken at national level to respond to EC level
directives had a considerable impact on the development of renewable energy production,
2
The term translation is utilized in actor network theory to refer to a process by which the objectives of one actor
are transferred onto others, thus recruiting them to the primary actor's network (Callon
et al.
, 1986 in Elzen
et al.
,
2012). Translation is defined differently in other applications of the MLP.
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