Theme
Does the current European geopolitical energy landscape foster or hamper renewable energies’ cooperation and exchanges? Which geopolitical or strategic role may renewables play? Are renewables (and CSP) included in governments’ energy security strategies? Can geopolitical externalities be a driver for renewable’s exchanges and cooperation mechanisms? How is CSP affected? Is there a geopolitical/strategic role for CSP? If so, to what extent is such a role integrated in the current European geopolitical energy landscape? Are there any elements in the literature to construct an appealing geopolitical narrative for intra-EU CSP deployment and exchanges?
This report tries to address the aforementioned questions by focusing on:
- The current energy geopolitical landscape in the European Union (EU).
- The rapidly growing academic and think tank literature devoted to the geopolitics of renewable energies and the energy transition.
- Interviews with experts and policy-makers on the geopolitics of renewables and CSP.
- Public opinion polls regarding electricity interconnections as a proxy for renewable electricity exchanges and cooperation.
In this context, it explores the literature in the fields of Geopolitics, International Relations (IR), International Political Economy (IPE) and Energy Studies, aiming to explore the main traits of the current European geopolitical energy landscape and the applications from the literature to build a narrative on the geopolitical externalities of renewables and, in particular, CSP.
Introduction
Does the current European geopolitical energy landscape foster or hamper renewable energies’ cooperation and exchanges? Which geopolitical or strategic role may renewables play? Are renewables (and CSP) included in governments’ energy security strategies? Can geopolitical externalities be a driver for renewable’s exchanges and cooperation mechanisms? How is CSP affected? Is there a geopolitical/strategic role for CSP? If so, to what extent is such a role integrated in the current European geopolitical energy landscape? Are there any elements in the literature to construct an appealing geopolitical narrative for intra-EU CSP deployment and exchanges? The deliverable tries to address these questions along the following four steps.
Section 1 deals with the current energy geopolitical landscape in the European Union (EU), especially countries eventually involved in CSP cooperation mechanisms. It focuses on two producers (Italy and Spain), a transit country (France) and Germany as importer country. Then, section 2 reviews the rapidly growing academic and think tank literature devoted to the geopolitics of renewable energies and the energy transition. The aim is to review whether there are conceptual or applied pieces of research that can be useful in assessing the geopolitical role of RES in general and, ideally, CSP in particular.
Section 3 presents the interviews with experts and policy-makers on the geopolitics of renewables and CSP, while section 4 presents the results obtained from public opinion polls regarding electricity interconnections as a proxy for renewable electricity exchanges and cooperation.1 Section 5 concludes summarising the discussion, emphasising the most relevant results on the geopolitical drivers for CSP and offering some tentative avenues for future research, intended to guide a more specific country and CSP focused deliverable, D.9.2 in work package 9.
To do so, the deliverable explores the literature in the fields of Geopolitics, International Relations (IR), International Political Economy (IPE) and Energy Studies. It does not aim to provide a comprehensive statistical analysis or to cover all the related literature. Rather, it tries to explore the main traits of the current European geopolitical energy landscape and the applications from the literature to build a narrative on the geopolitical externalities of renewables and, in particular, CSP.
Geopolitical context
Geopolitics has been defined as “the analysis of the interaction between, on the one hand, geographical settings and perspectives and, on the other, political processes” Cohen (2015: 16). In this regard, at a macro level, the current global geopolitical context is characterised by the comeback of great-power competition and a relative decline of the so-called liberal order. Such a landscape is also prone for mid- and regional powers to test the limits of a seemingly eroding global/multilateral governance system. 2 So, geopolitical competition is expected to intensify both globally and regionally. It is interesting to note, for the purposes of this deliverable, that some revisionist powers (ie. Russia), and several regional powers (ie. Saudi Arabia) are also playing revisionism in climate geopolitics.
For the EU, the current European geopolitical landscape includes challenges in its Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods, from Russian revisionism to instability and open conflicts in the Mediterranean. 3Some of these threats are now being perceived even inside European Member States to undermine democracy, the EU and NATO, in what has been termed the geopolitics of populism (Biscop, 2019: 139). There is the sense that a geopolitical transition towards power politics and hard power is happening, somehow reversing the efforts to advance global governance through normative and (civilian) soft power. Even the EU has recognised this in its recent Global Strategy, based upon “principled pragmatism” rather than “normative power” or “external governance”.4
In principle, such a depiction would seem favourable to narratives exploring the geopolitical externalities of deploying renewables and accelerating the energy transition. If there is a consensus that a more strategically oriented and competitive energy landscape is developing abroad, renewable cooperation within the EU should be straightforward. If only because the dominant EU’s energy policy pathway points to drastic reductions in European fossil fuels’ imports. While there may be political limits to a EU-only inward renewable strategy, policy consistency with EU’s renewable and climate-related targets imply managing its geopolitical and foreign policy implications.
Achieving the energy transition entails a severe geopolitical shift for the wider EU neighbourhood and the EU itself. By 2050 Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, Libya or Russia should not be exporting as much oil or gas to the EU. There should be fewer oil or gas transiting pipelines (and reduced transit fees) through Belarus, Georgia, Turkey or Ukraine. Oil and gas geopolitics would have to shift from managing scarce resources and huge rents to deal with idle reserves and infrastructures (Van de Graaf, 2018).
However, the geopolitical transition induced by de-carbonisation does not happen in a vacuum. Member States’ external action is shaped by geographical and historical elements. Even if the energy transition radically transforms their geopolitical context (ie. reducing energy dependence from Russian or Algerian gas), foreign policy preferences are expected to show path-dependency. Russia and Algeria will continue to be of strategic importance to Germany and Spain, and both for Italy, regardless of low gas import levels (or perhaps precisely because of it).
In fact, as discussed later, there are few signs that the strategic/geopolitics policy community is taking the energy transition seriously enough. The foreign policy debate regarding energy continues to be almost completely oil and (especially) gas centred. The remaining of this section succinctly presents the on-going European conversation on energy geopolitics with a focus on the gas regime in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Gonzalo Escribano
Elcano Royal Institute | @g_escribano
Lara Lázaro Touza
Elcano Royal Institute | @lazarotouza
Yolanda Lechón
CIEMAT | @YLechon
Christian Oltra
CIEMAT | @christianoltra
Roser Sala
CIEMAT
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1 Real Instituto Elcano funded the survey and is independent from the funding received for the completion of D 6.4.
2 The international relations’ think tank and practitioners recent literature on both issues is almost endless. See for instance Ikenberry (2011), Nye (2016), Kagan (2017), Niblett (2017) and Powell (2017).
3 Adopting some of the socio-technical transition literature concepts, the “energy geographies” literature refers to geopolitical energy landscapes as geo-political and geo-economic assessments of “dynamic entities constituted by complex local, national and transnational flows of technology, funding and ideology” (Calvert, 2015; Power et al., 2016: 12). In this deliverable, the concept is broadened to include external and /or global governance patterns and failures (Escribano and Valdés, 2017).
4 European External Action Service (2016). On the EUGS’ pragmatist turn see for instance Biscop (2016), Youngs (2017), Dijkstra (2016) and Juncos (2017).
