Conference Agenda

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.