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International audience; Focusing on a successful local photovoltaic project in France, this paper retraces the emergence and constitution of a territorial capacity to take part in the development of renewable energy as driven by a private actor (an agricultural cooperative) that relied on the combination of policy support, of a tradition of mutualisation, and of its territorial implantation. A relational perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship is adopted to describe the various entanglements that hold this project together. The development of a local renewable energy project and its community is seen as a collective endeavour that requires to establish and consolidate relationships between people and things; relationships are negotiated, tested and shaped through series of trials. I pay particular attention to the material and cognitive devices that are used to articulate the market policy framework and the territory (understood as a geographical, patrimonial and social entity), particularly by organising mutualisation. This enables me to explore how supporting policies and the territory are mobilised and enacted in the course of the project, and the extent to which both are transformed in the process. Supporting policies are turned into a tool for territorial innovation and development, while the tradition of territorial mutualisation that is constitutive of the cooperative that promoted the project becomes a way to provide access to a market and to maximise and redistribute associated profits. This highlights the entanglements through which a specific conception of equity is enacted in a project, and redistributive concerns are incorporated into an economics-centred policy device.

This chapter focuses on the period between the late 1970s and the adoption of the Directive on the internal electricity market in 1996. This period saw the appearance of feed-in tariffs as well as the emergence of a European Union approach to renewable energy policy, though without direct connections between the two. Cointe and Nadai retrace the origins of FITs, starting from their introduction in Germany and Denmark as a tool to integrate wind power into existing electricity systems and showing how they turned into renewable energy support instruments. They then analyse early European renewable energy policy, stressing that it was guided by the ideal of a liberalised market as a device for economic and social optimisation.

The chapter retraces the period from 2008 to 2015 as a phase of many reforms and reconsiderations in renewable electricity policies throughout the European Union. Focusing on the example of photovoltaics, Cointe and Nadai show that feed-in tariffs were re-opened and re-politicised along new lines. The authors outline several challenges in the design of feed-in tariffs as they were addressed and discussed in the literature. They then discuss the reception of these evolutions by the European Commission. The Commission eventually shunned feed-in tariffs and encouraged their phase-out, based on a concern for investment security and for the operation of the single market. This suggests the internal electricity market is now conceived primarily as a tool for the optimal orientation of investment.

The chapter analyses two evolutions in European renewable electricity policy between 2001 and 2008. The first was a sophistication of renewable electricity support schemes, in particular feed-in tariffs. The second was the consolidation of expertise about renewable electricity policy. Cointe and Nadai describe how feed-in tariffs were re-arranged in their design and in their relations to European law. In parallel, they trace the expansion of literature on renewable electricity policy. This production of expertise was partly driven by the European Commission and its will to coordinate renewable electricity policy across Europe via regular assessments. The chapter ends on an analysis of the validation of feed-in tariffs as “market-based” by the Commission, arguing that it also reflected a shift in focus from competition to investment.

The introductory chapter describes the intention of the book and provides an overview of feed-in tariffs and renewable energy policy in the European Union (EU). It outlines the perimeter and analytical approach of the book. Cointe and Nadai first describe feed-in tariffs and their origins. They review milestones of European renewable energy policy and their relations to the diffusion of feed-in tariffs in Member States. Having provided this background information, Cointe and Nadai account for their choice to rely on a combination of documentation from European institutions, expert sources, and academics. They define socio-technical agencements and explain what an analysis of feed-in tariffs as agencements brings to an understanding of renewable energy policy and EU policy.

This chapter is interested in the period corresponding to the elaboration of the Directive on the promotion of renewable electricity, from 1996 to 2001. It looks at debates about renewable electricity policy at the European Union level as they became more specific: as national renewable electricity policies developed and diversified, attention started to focus on instrument choice. Having described the range of instruments in use, Cointe and Nadai take the opposition between FITs and TGCs as a vantage point to analyse the Commission’s vision and its discrepancies with national policies. They show how the Commission was guided by an ideal of harmonisation via the market that was not the priority in all Member States. They trace the emergence of similar debates in academic circles.

International audience; In France as in many European countries, grid-connected photovoltaics (PV) took off between 2008 and 2010, driven by an overly attractive feed-in tariff scheme that failed to take into account the rapid evolutions of PV technologies and markets. This unexpected expansion of a policy-dependent market led to a moratorium on feed-in tariffs followed by a consultation with stakeholders in 2010-2011. This article analyses the build-up, explosion and resolution of this crisis by focusing on the market and political effects of feed-in tariffs in the years 2008 to 2011. The consultation is analysed as an attempt at the political organisation and representation of the emerging PV sector. The paper shows that it failed to constitute a reliable representation of it, and that the government addressed the difficulty to control the sector by closing down both the market and the political space. It concludes that the good functioning of feed-in tariffs requires work of market organisation as much as of political construction, since their regulation relies on market data and on political compromises.