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Pricing power: the distributional politics of European electrification
This seminar will be held in a hybrid format. To join this seminar online, please register through this link: Register Here
Abstract
For social scientists, a key question about decarbonization is who wins, who loses, and why. Climate politics research has been focused on the struggle between green and brown interests. This project builds on more recent scholarship that conceptualizes climate policy as a distributional bargain between different corporate actors and the state, and contends that much of this bargaining has taken place in the electricity sector. It starts from the premise that electricity prices are inherently political outcomes: market design, subsidies, tariff structures and network charging regulations are all politically shaped and impose a high degree of price discrimination between consumer groups.
Electricity pricing is used to advance social equity, to recover policy investment costs, and serves as a mid-range tool of industrial policy. Even within the common European electricity market, member states have deployed electricity pricing in very different ways as an instrument of coordination and distribution in the energy transition. I argue that cross-country variation in these decarbonization bargains can be explained by the relative political influence of key actors on the consumer and producer sides of the electricity system, as well as the distributional capacities of governments under different economic growth models.
Through comparative case studies of Germany, Sweden, Spain, and the United Kingdom the thesis project thus reveals distributive dimensions of the energy transition that have so far been insufficiently acknowledged – insights that may help better understand the varying successes of electrification across countries.
Biography
Max is a doctoral researcher in the Political Economy cluster at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and currently a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.