Avoiding dangerous climate change necessitates the decarbonization of electricity systems within the next few decades. In Germany, this decarbonization is based on an increased exploitation of variable renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar power. While system security has remained constantly high, the integration of renewables causes additional costs. In 2015, the costs of grid management saw an all time high of about € 1 billion. Despite the addition of renewable capacity, these costs dropped substantially in 2016. We thus investigate the effect of natural climate variability on grid management costs in this study. We show that the decline is triggered by natural wind variability focusing on redispatch as a main cost driver. In particular, we find that 2016 was a weak year in terms of wind generation averages and the occurrence of westerly circulation weather types. Moreover, we show that a simple model based on the wind generation time series is skillful in detecting redispatch events on timescales of weeks and beyond. As a consequence, alterations in annual redispatch costs in the order of hundreds of millions of euros need to be understood and communicated as a normal feature of the current system due to natural wind variability.

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Against the backdrop of climate and environmental pressures, as well as limited resource availability and trade conflicts, devising policies for energy and the use of natural resources in general becomes exceedingly complex. Moreover, policies are required to account for interrelations between individual resources and between different sectors and policy fields, but implementation often lacks. To evaluate the current state of integrated policy design in the EU, a review of European energy, water, and agricultural policies was conducted. Using a qualitative comparative research approach, the objective was to identify and explain the differing degrees and variations in policy integration among them. To this aim, the concepts “Environmental Policy Integration” and “Water-Energy-Land Nexus” were jointly applied as analytical frameworks. The analysis revealed that currently, different authorities are endowed with largely sectoral mandates. Accordingly, the respective sectoral policy sets are historically grown based on differing sets of formal and informal rules and processes, thus making policy integration among the sectors, let alone within the nexus, a highly challenging task.

The current transition towards low-carbon energy systems does not only involve changes in technologies but is also shaped by changes in the rules and regulations (i.e., the institutions) that govern energy systems. Institutional change can be influenced by changes in core values-normative principles such as affordability, security of supply, and sustainability. Analyzing this influence, however, has been hindered by the absence of a structured framework that highlights the role of values in institutional change processes. This paper presents an interdisciplinary framework explicating how values influence institutional change in the case of the energy transition. We build on a dynamic framework for institutional change that combines the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework with the concept of social learning. This basic analytical framework is expanded by conceptualizations of values in moral philosophy, institutional economics, and social psychology. Our framework offers researchers and policy makers an analytical tool to identify how values are embedded in infrastructure and existing regulation and how values shape communities and behavior. It explains how value controversies can trigger social learning processes that eventually can result in structural change. Thus, this framework allows analyzing institutional change over time as well as comparing change patterns across spatial and temporal contexts.

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