Exploring sustainability transitions in the electricity sector with socio-technical pathways

Abstract

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The commercialisation of emerging energy technologies: the strategic alliances of high-technology entrepreneurial firms

“…The evolution of the sector and the impact of these changes in the sectoral regime have been addressed by the literature, namely by the two main streams of the "regime transition" literature: the literature on sociotechnical transitions that proposes a multilevel perspective on regime transition (e.g. Geels, 2002;Geels and Schott, 2007;Verbong and Geels, 2010;Foxon et al, 2010); and the technology innovation systems literature that proposes a system functions approach (e.g. Hekkert et al, 2007;Jacobsson and Bergek, 2004;Hekkert and Negro, 2009).…”

“…The liberalisation of the energy sector brought about the extinction of public monopolies, with transmission of ownership and management to private companies operating in a competitive market. It also forced the separation between energy production, transmission, distribution and commercialisation, which made market entry comparatively easier, at least in some segments (Verbong and Geels, 2010).…”

“…The distributed nature of some of the new energy sources also favoured new entry, which was further encouraged by a variety of incentives for production and use (Schoettl and Lehmann-Ortega, 2010). This challenged the dominant position of old utilities (Duncan, 2010) and led to some readjustments in the actor composition and balance of power (Verbong and Geels, 2010).…”

“…The still limited penetration of renewable energies is largely related to production cost differentials and grid integration problems (Jacobsson and Bergek, 2004;Verbong and Geels, 2010;IPCC, 2011).…”

Electricity portfolio innovation for energy security: The case of carbon constrained China

“…It also is the most concentrated sector in terms of emissions per source, and accounts for more emissions than any other sector [17,18,19]. At the same time potential reductions in the carbon intensity of the electricity sector can benefit other sectors, which can be partially electrified.…”