ABSTRACT
Sweden has an exceptional technology-neutral renewable support mix. This chapter investigates why Sweden ended up with a type of renewables support unlike the technology-specific support mixes dominant elsewhere in Europe. The electricity certificate idea came to Sweden from the European Commission in the late 1990s, and a scheme was introduced in 2003. The initial EU influence eventually became strongly institutionalized in the political field. Particularly in the period 2010–2016, political steering was an important independent determinant for the design of Sweden’s renewables support mix. Hence, we find that the effect of Europeanization is determined neither by the strength of coercive signals from the EU nor by the diffusion of practices in the European environment: it is conditioned by the domestic fields. After 2010, renewables became a salient political issue in Sweden, and the organizational field was determined to prolong the Swedish certificate scheme despite opposition from utilities calling for more technology-specific support. This chapter shows how Europeanization at one stage in time could ‘freeze’, remaining effective many decades after the EU had shifted its policy and was promoting different policies and practices.
