Diffusion of Renewable Energy Technologies: The Case of Europe

The worldwide generation of energy from renewable resources such as wind, sun, biomass, water, or ground heat, is constantly growing. The focus of the current work is European Union as it is a unique case when intergovernmental organization has applied binding targets for RE diffusion among 28 countries. Confederation nature of EU (common goals and regulation vs local policies) still leaves a lot of questions in terms strategy implantation among its members due to differences in institutional environment and a variety of other factors. Despite common goals, there are still substantial differences between the EU Member States regarding the level of implementation of best practices in RE policies and market regulation (Boie, 2016). This work is aimed at exploration of a potential source of these difference through the usage of case study method on the extreme best sample unit of the European Union, which is Germany. To support the analyses ground theoretical observation was conducted on three levels of diffusion of innovations. The final model includes 5 key factors that mostly influence diffusion of RE: Government Commitment, Profitability Conditions, Electricity Market Structure, Grid connectivity, Administrative complexity. The success of Germany case is validated by extremely high level of development of the first three factors. The development of the first one was possible due to high integration with EU government policy in this fields, which constitutes one of the main connection between these two levels of governance and, potentially, source of overperforming. Limitations of this paper as well as further perspectives are connected with data collection from more insightful sources as well as more wider application of theoretical framework in order to get better understanding of patterns in diffusion of RE.