Conference Agenda

The recent EU energy crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has shined a spotlight on energy poverty as a crucial challenge for the EU’s green transition. While the European Green Deal advanced a number of initiatives to reform energy governance – from renewables to energy efficiency and market design reforms – it has also granted the concept of energy poverty official recognition in EU policy frameworks, notably through the Social Climate Fund (SCF). The SCF explicitly framed energy poverty as a critical issue of energy justice, laying the groundwork for its further integration into policy debates, including the revision of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED).

Energy poverty reflects households' inability to afford adequate energy services, yet its definition and measurement hinge on complex policy and epistemic practices. Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have highlighted how measurement practices do more than quantify phenomena; they construct social realities and shape policy priorities (Dunlop and Völker, 2023; Bandola-Gill, 2022). Within the context of energy efficiency policies – historically focused on reducing energy inputs while maintaining services –competing visions of energy justice, redistribution, and the lived realities of energy-poor households have seldom addressed. These policies, built on assemblages of regulatory tools standards, often risk ‘black-boxing’ the social and material dimensions of energy use, reinforcing specific imaginaries of energy transition while sidelining others.

This paper, thus, interrogates the epistemic dynamics underpinning the emergence of energy poverty as a crucial theme in the governance of the energy transition. Through a critical analysis of the recent revision of EU legislation, the paper examines how the Commission and other actors’ epistemic work constructed energy poverty as a governable object. It explores the assemblage of knowledge, metrics, and narratives that stabilise specific approaches to defining and addressing the issue. By unravelling this epistemic dimension of policy-making, the paper aims to shed light on how EU energy policies not only respond to contingent events and changing priorities but also reshape underlying ideas of energy access, equity, and justice in the green transition.

European energy-intensive industries (EIIs) face the dual challenge of decarbonising while maintaining international competitiveness. On the one hand, the European Union’s (EU) climate targets require that EIIs reach close to zero emissions before 2050, which is possible but requires a far-reaching transformation of these industries. On the other hand, due to high international competition, overproduction and high energy prices, European EIIs face severe economic pressures and competitiveness concerns, which threaten the existence of EIIs in Europe and undermine their decarbonisation. Addressing this dual challenge will require a comprehensive, coherent and coordinated industrial strategy and multi-level governance framework across Europe. However, the development thereof has been constrained by limited EU-level competencies regarding industrial policies and constraints of member state industrial policy under EU competition law. As a result, existing industrial strategies and policies for decarbonisation remain fragmented and incoherent across Europe.

Against this backdrop, this paper will explore how the EU’s governance framework for decarbonising EIIs can be strengthened. To that end, this paper will analyse the existing multi-level governance framework of EII decarbonisation across the EU and member state level (taking Germany and Spain as examples), based on relevant policy documents, academic literature, and expert interviews. This allows to identify gaps and challenges across the existing governance framework for EII decarbonisation and to discuss potential options to address these shortcomings. The findings of the paper will contribute to the development of a more effective governance framework for EII decarbonisation and advance the academic discussions on EU industrial policy and climate governance.

In order to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees, substantial investments in climate change mitigation technologies are required. However, far from being a purely technological fix, the social context is central for understanding the dynamics of different pathways towards decarbonising energy systems. A lack of social acceptance represents a major challenge to this end. An extensive body of literature has been devoted to the micro-level determinants of bottom-up approaches for the energy transition. A main focus so far has been laid on trade-off processes between economic, financial, spatial and environmental drivers and barriers. Especially in the context of controversial technologies such as wind energy, many research projects have addressed issues of local project acceptance to identify drivers and barriers of renewable energy development. Without a doubt, local acceptance is a crucial factor for a successful and just sustainable energy transition.

The idea of "energy citizenship" elevates citizens from a passive role in the energy transition as consumers or affected residents. Active citizen participation is considered crucial for a just and sustainable energy transition. The role of energy communities as a bottom-up, citizen-oriented form of organization is becoming increasingly important and recognized. In the EU context, the Commission has reacted to this growing dynamic by introducing the concepts of "citizen energy communities" and "renewable energy communities" in its Clean energy for all European package, adopted in 2019.

Citizen-led energy initiatives such as energy cooperatives have been growing across the EU to meet the increasing demand for renewable energy generation and distribution. In many cases, municipal actors co-create these projects together with citizens and other stakeholders. Conceptually, many of these projects can be considered collaborative or self-governance processes in the energy transition. In this project, we examine the attitude-behaviour-link for local energy projects by studying local acceptance as well as citizens' willingness to invest in renewable energy cooperatives. Based on two studies we investigate justice considerations as well as trust and perceived neighbourhood social cohesion for energy citizenship. Based on a choice and factorial survey experiment among more than 9000 citizens from 16 EU countries, this project disentangles the effects of procedural, distributive and recognition justice dimensions for the active participation and investment decisions of citizens in local renewable energy projects. Our project offers empirical evidence based on a large-n cross-country comparison including European regions which have been neglected in energy transition research so far.

The European Union’s (EU) ambitious goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2050 requires the EU to implement drastic changes in its energy sector. The Russian war in Ukraine demonstrated that the EU should align its energy policies with its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and pursue ‘strategic autonomy'. The cornerstone of the EU’s rapid decarbonisation objective in the energy field is the hydrogen strategy, which entails increasing hydrogen’s share in the EU’s energy market from about 2% to 13-14% by 2050. The rationale behind the EU’s strategy is that ‘green’ hydrogen produced through electrolysis does not produce greenhouse gases. Additionally, hydrogen can play a major role in the decarbonisation of the transport sector.

To achieve this goal the EU set a target of producing 10 million tonnes of hydrogen and importing the same amount from third countries by 2030. Importing of hydrogen brings to the EU new possibilities and challenges that need to be examined. It raises the question of how the EU can avoid the creation of new dependencies on the hydrogen exporters. Furthermore, as the global hydrogen market is still in the process of development, it provides the EU with the possibility to exercise its normative powerness in terms of setting standards for hydrogen production. Due to the dearth of the academic literature on the impact of the hydrogen strategy on the EU’s CFSP, the paper aims to fill it by exploring what challenges the hydrogen strategy poses to the EU’s strategic autonomy, in terms of the risk of creation of new dependencies. Simultaneously, the paper will investigate how the EU can instrumentalise hydrogen strategy to strengthen its normative powerness.