Koordination von Innovations-, Energie- und Umweltpolitik

The objectives recently announced by the government in the framework of the energy concept and the so-called energy turnaround illustrate fundamental structural changes in the energy system, involving attempts to achieve a far-reaching departure from carbon intensive fossil fuels and a mid-term withdrawal from nuclear energy. This study puts its focus on the coordination of innovation, energy and environmental policies. In the absence of such coordination, there could be a potential loss of effectiveness, targets may not be reached, there may be a loss in efficiency, especially in the form of unnecessary costs; and there may also be additional undesirable side-effects (like unfavourable distributional effects, for example, or effects on industry competitiveness). Interactions may arise, above all, if several instruments are used to pursue policy goals that are not unrelated, or if several instruments are considered necessary to counteract different forms of market or coordination failure. The increasingly probable interaction between policies may have different effects: instruments may complement and mutually reinforce one another, but they may also neutralise or even counteract one another, thus undermining policy goals and their own credibility. As the number of instruments and overlaps grows, the probability that real "policy backlogs" and unexpected side-effects will occur tends to increase. This kind of policy interaction has been paid relatively little attention to date. In economics in particular, analyses mostly focus on individual instruments or compare instruments, but without taking interactions into consideration. Based on a review of developments in various policy sub-fields, this project therefore summarizes different forms of interaction between innovation, energy and environmental policy against the backdrop of the transformation of the energy system, described their effects, analyzed and evaluated them and deduced their implications for effective and efficient policy coordination.