Projects

The Sustainability Transition Policy team is supported by the German Research Association (DFG) in the National Research Infrastructure for Energy project (NFDI4Energy). In this project, we are responsible for generation and publication of energy-political data, and for preparing this in ways that makes it useful for energy policy scholars in Germany and elsewhere. This includes data on technology support policies and climate and energy targets, but also on regulations for where which technologies (e.g. wind farms, power lines) can and cannot be built. Long data series for such data are not presently available, and the individual datasets (e.g. for a specific country or set of countries) are generally not verified, machine-readable or tagged with appropriate metadata. In NFDI4Energy, we will develop longitudinal policy datasets for as many countries as possible, both in Europe and in other parts for the world.

We also work on ways to make energy models more useful for supporting policy decisions, including developing ways to include political (e.g. regulations, support schemes) and societal (e.g. acceptance and opposition) factors in energy models.

In fall 2024, we will start the new project WieTrans, funded by the Federal German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), working on defining policy pathways and integrating policy as explicit variables into energy models. More info on this project will follow!