Policy Feedbacks in Integrated Climate and Energy Policies. Europeanization and Domestic Preference Formation in the Spanish Electricity Sector, 1997-2020

Abstract

The EU has progressively embarked into a transition to a decarbonized, competitive, and secure electricity system. The three goals of liberalization, environmental protection and security of supply have often been described as mutually excluding rather than reinforcing. As a result, the implementation of Climate and Energy Policy between 2009 and 2020 should have pushed Member States to be cautious in ceding more competences to the EU and subscribing to more ambitious renewable goals for the following decade. In other words, EU electricity regulation should have become the object of growing contestation on the part of Member States. This hypothesis does not apply to the outcomes of Europeanization and the subsequent process of domestic preference formation in the case of Spain. While the country first opposed the expansion of EU competences in some areas of electricity regulation and the adoption of ambitious renewable energy goals, the position was soon reversed by a change in government, which instead actively supported the continuation of an ambitious climate and energy policy driven by the EU. Therefore, it cannot be concluded that the Europeanization process has led to the emergence of an undisputed domestic interest to be defended at EU level. To explain this outcome, the dissertation advances the hypothesis that the EU impact on domestic Europeanization processes has been unequal across different areas of electricity policy, across actors and across time. First, it is theorized that the impact of EU climate and energy policy depends on the extent to which the complementarity of the different energy policy goals is fully or only partially addressed by effective steering powers attributed at EU levels. Second, that such complementarity can be improved or impaired by domestic actors which can act in accordance with the overarching goals of the energy transition or in accordance to more pressing and narrow domestic goals. Finally, the theoretical approach of policy feedback loops is used to explain the subsequent impact on the process of domestic preference formation. Positive feedback loops lead to the establishment of a favourable coalition in support of the continuation of EU competence expansion. On the contrary, domestic conflict over EU competence expansion arises in case of incomplete feedback loops, i.e., when EU policies do not guarantee that all the relevant complementarities are satisfactorily addressed or because a specific EU competence does not exist, and actors import experience from abroad. From a methodological perspective two sets of matched cases are compared. The first set of matched cases analyses the case of renewable energy. It is found that while the increase in EU competences over the choice of support mechanisms has been widely accepted domestically, the increase in renewable ambition has been the object of domestic conflict and EU contestation. The reason of this difference is that, after experimenting with different types of support mechanisms, a positive feedback loops has finally been achieved via the use of auctions while the lack of sufficient levels of electricity transport interconnections between the Iberian Peninsula and the Continental Europe has prevented the same positive policy feedback from occurring in relation to agreeing to ambitious renewable goals. The second set of matched cases analyses the relation between the state and citizens. In the case of regulated prices and tariff setting, the negative feedback with domestic discretion and the disregard of the principle of tariff sufficiency has opened the door to a positive feedback after the adoption of regulated prices which are cost reflective. In contrast, the case of self-consumption shows how problems can arise from importing experiences from abroad, in the absence of EU regulation.