ABSTRACT
France was late in adopting support to renewables, but by 2014 it had a complex technology-specific support mix, featuring an auctioning-based feed-in premium. The EU has gradually gained more authority over national renewables support, and feed-in premiums combined with auctioning have become increasingly widespread in Europe after 2014. Thus, it would be natural to expect that the European environment played a major role in the development of France’s support scheme. However, we find that the French support-scheme mix is the result of intricate interplay between the European environment and developments in the domestic political and organizational fields. Despite the highly segmented nature of the French stationary-energy field, and the dominance of its centralized nuclear energy technology-development logic, France adopted a modest support scheme in the 1990s, modelled on the auctioning-based UK scheme of the time. Later, political field dynamics can explain why auctioning was combined with feed-in. The organizational field has been important for developments in the French support scheme, but political steering proved vital at certain crucial points. Further, whereas national feed-in models in the European environment served as a major source of inspiration, other parts of this environment (not least EU state-aid policy) have later constrained the processes of adjusting and improving the French support mix.
