Nicolas Schmid

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Schmid

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Nicolas

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0000-0003-4348-6031

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Publications 1 - 10 of 14

A comparative and dynamic analysis of political party positions on energy technologies
Schmid, Nicolas (2021)
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions
Sowing the seeds of change: Policy feedback and ratcheting up in South African energy policy
Schmid, Nicolas; Lumsden, Christina (2023)
Energy Policy
More ambitious and stringent policy intervention is required to accelerate the transition to renewable energy technologies. The ratcheting-up of policy ambition hinges on the political feasibility of policy change. Positive policy feedback can, in theory, enhance the political feasibility of ratcheting-up by creating pro-change constituencies and policy learning. To analyze the empirical mechanisms through which policy feedback operates, in this study, we analyze two energy policy instruments in South Africa. We examine how the Renewable Energy Independent Power Procurement Program (REIPPP), a renewable energy auction program for niche support, affected the re-design of the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), a central energy planning instrument. We use a qualitative case study approach, drawing on a large dataset of policy documents, public consultation responses and expert interviews. We show that REIPPP, through mechanisms of largely positive interpretive and resource feedback, has increased the political feasibility of more ambitious, pro-renewable energy planning in IRP. Our case thus demonstrates positive political feedback from the market creation to the central planning policy instrument. The findings suggest that the temporal sequencing of (re-designing) policy instruments can, under certain conditions, enable dynamic ratcheting up of energy policy mixes and thus sow the seeds for major policy change.
Elite vs. mass politics of sustainability transitions
Schmid, Nicolas; Beaton, Christopher; Kern, Florian; et al. (2021)
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions
While the past decade of transitions scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the centrality of politics, key questions on transition politics deserve further research. Here, we develop a heuristic framework from the discipline of political science that separates transition politics into the classic categories of interests, ideas, institutions, as well as elite and mass politics. Based on this framework, we conduct a review of existing transitions literature on politics. We find that some areas of our framework are better covered than others. For instance, while the institutional foundations of elite politics are relatively well researched, there are only few studies on interests and ideas in mass politics. In geographical and sectoral terms, research is biased toward energy transitions in Europe and North America. Based on our review, we map areas for future research we believe to be indispensable to better understand varieties of transition politics.
The politics of enabling tipping points for sustainable development
Fesenfeld, Lukas Paul; Schmid, Nicolas; Finger, Robert; et al. (2022)
One Earth
Achieving most sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the Paris climate targets depends on the fast transformation of complex socio-technical systems. Recent research has highlighted the importance of crossing positive tipping points to accelerate the transformation of complex energy, food, and transport systems. Yet, there is a lack of research on the politics of enabling such tipping points. Here, we argue that policy strategies enabling the creation and crossing of such points are needed. Such strategies should harness political feedbacks from both technological and behavioral changes over time. To inform such strategies, we need a better empirical understanding of how these feedbacks unfold, eventually resulting in tipping points. We propose a novel framework to structure such feedback research by linking it to three core sustainability principles, namely efficiency, sufficiency, and substitution. Our framework advances ongoing debates about the politics of enabling tipping points for sustainable development.
Globalising innovation through co-inventions the success case of the Korean lithium-ion battery industry
Peiseler, Leopold Johannes Florentin Max; Jun, Ye Lin; Schmid, Nicolas; et al. (2024)
Environmental Research Letters
Radical innovations can shift the global competitiveness of entire nations. While countries typically struggle to absorb knowledge about novel technologies quickly, in which knowledge tends to be spatially sticky, an important exception is the fast catch-up of the Korean Li-ion battery industry from Japan in the early 2000s. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory case study on this surprising success story. Focussing on patent co-inventions between Korea and Japan, we investigate their significance, as well as underlying types of co-inventions and types of transferred knowledge. To this end, we proceed in four steps: (1) a Poisson regression model; (2) social network analyses; (3) patent inventor tracking and (4) patent coding. Our results indicate that Korean Japanese co-inventions hold significantly greater influence than other cross-country co-inventions, including with patents without cross-country collaboration. We find a pronounced knowledge-Transfer intensity during the early 2000s and observe two types of co-inventions: organisation-level and inventor-level. Predominantly, we observe inventor-level co-inventions, i.e. Korean companies hiring experienced Japanese engineers, that proved important to transferring sticky knowledge. Moreover, while most patents target the design of core battery components, the share of manufacturing patents are contrary to theoretical expectations highest during the first half of the observation period. We also discuss our findings and draw implications for policy, industrial and academic players, including industry localisation policies, technology-inherent catch-up strategies and directions for future research.
The politics of technological change - case studies from the energy sector
Schmid, Nicolas (2020)
Technological change, i.e. the invention, innovation and diffusion of new technologies, is a key driver of economic development and societal progress. There is widespread agreement that, historically, energy technologies have been at the core of most technological revolutions. Yet, the transition to and diffusion of fossil fuel-based energy technologies has come at high societal and ecological costs, most notably climate change. A fast and deep transition to low-carbon technologies – particularly renewable energy and efficiency technologies – is the main lever to address climate change. While deployment of these technologies has grown significantly over the last decades – largely policy-induced – this transition needs to be further accelerated and deepened through public policies. In light of various trade-offs and competing policy goals, implementing and designing these policies is an intrinsically political endeavor. A growing body of literature at the intersection of public policy, political science, and innovation studies covers these aspects of energy politics. Yet, energy politics not only influence technological change through public policy – technological change can also, in turn, influence politics. A better understanding of this inverse effect of technological change on politics is necessary to formulate politically feasible and effective energy policy. While a nascent body of literature deals with these aspects in the context of the transition to renewable energy and efficiency technologies, how exactly such low-carbon technological change affects what aspects of politics still remains a black box. In an exploratory approach, this dissertation attempts to address this research gap with the following overarching question: How does low-carbon technological change affect energy politics? To answer this question, this cumulative dissertation is built on a heuristic framework: On an abstract level, it argues that technological change can affect politics through both its expanding and (re)distributional capacity. It further proposes that politics can be disaggregated into the categories of interests, ideas, and institutions, on the level of both elite and mass politics. The individual papers in this dissertation cover various elements of this heuristic framework and leverage a plurality of qualitative and quantitative methods, and individual case studies. Focusing on how technological change affects the interests and ideas of elite politics, Paper 1 examines how the transition to renewable energy technologies influenced the composition and strength of advocacy coalitions in the German energy sector. The main contribution of this paper is to substantiate the mechanisms through which policy-induced technological change affects coalitions, and to link these mechanisms to patterns of actor movements underlying coalition change. Paper 2 also focuses on aspects of ideas in elite politics and touches upon institutions as moderating factor. It examines how technological change drives regulators’ perceived feasibility of more stringent public and private regulation of energy efficiency technologies in the Swiss building sector. The contribution of this paper is to highlight that the interaction among public and private regulation can run through the mechanism of technological change. Also focusing on ideas and institutions in elite politics, paper 3 examines how technological change affects the positions of political parties on energy technologies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The paper shows that technological change is a driver of party positions and their salience, and that this effect is mediated by party and party system characteristics. Finally, paper 4 examines interests in mass politics by focusing on how the decline in coal mining affects voting behavior in presidential elections in the United States. The paper shows that also decline in technologies can result in political effects, in this case resistance in form of voting in favor of pro-coal candidates. Based on a mixed methods approach and systematic data collection, these four papers give novel empirical insights into how technological change affects interests, ideas, and institutions in elite and mass energy politics. Based on these insights, the papers engage in theory-building. Notably, the dissertation provides a framework in which energy politics is described as a dynamic feedback loop of public policy, technological change, and politics. Further, the dissertation substantiates various mechanisms that link technological change to politics, and analyzes the effects of technological change on a variety of relevant political actors. Doing so, it contributes to current academic debates in public policy, political science, and innovation studies on energy politics. Further, this dissertation also has policy implications: Policymakers’ focus should be on the expanding and (re)distributional effects of technological change on energy and climate politics. More sensibility to the locus and nature of these political struggles could enable effective forward-looking policy strategies that sow the seeds today for broader political support tomorrow. Finally, future research should aim at testing the theory built in this dissertation with more quantitative research methods. Future research should also build on this exploratory dissertation by expanding the empirical scope to other low-carbon technologies, and expand the policy feedback logic to other policy outcomes such as nature-based solutions and behavioral change.
Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback
Schmid, Nicolas; Sewerin, Sebastian; Schmidt, Tobias (2019)
Policy Studies Journal
Despite the prominence of exogenous factors in theories of policy change, the precise mechanisms that link such factors to policy change remain elusive: The effects of exogenous factors on the politics underlying policy change are not sufficiently conceptualized and empirically analyzed. To address this gap, we propose to distinguish between truly exogenous factors and policy outcomes to better understand policy change. Specifically, we combine the Advocacy Coalition Framework with policy feedback theory to conceptualize a complete feedback loop among policy, policy outcomes, and subsequent politics. Aiming at theory‐building, we use policy feedback mechanisms to explain why advocacy coalitions change over time. Empirically, we conduct a longitudinal single case study on policy‐induced technological change in the German energy subsystem, an extreme case of policy outcomes, from 1983 to 2013. First, using discourse network analysis, we identify four patterns of actor movements, explaining coalition decline and growth. Second, using process tracing, we detect four policy feedback mechanisms explaining these four actor movements. With this inductive mixed‐methods approach, we build a conceptual framework in which policy outcomes affect subsequent politics through feedback mechanisms. We develop propositions on how coalition change and feedback mechanisms explain four ideal‐typical trajectories of policy change.
Backlash to fossil fuel phase-outs: the case of coal mining in US presidential elections
Egli, Florian Manuel; Schmid, Nicolas; Schmidt, Tobias (2022)
Environmental Research Letters
Phasing out coal is a crucial lever in reaching international climate targets. However, the resulting jobs losses might trigger voter backlash, making phase-outs politically costly. Here, we present an analysis of the electoral response to coal mining job losses in US presidential elections using matched and bordering difference-in-difference estimators. Our findings confirm that fossil fuel phase-outs can result in voter backlash. In our main specification, we find a four percentage-point (pp) increase in the Republican vote share in 2012 (range across specs. = 3.6 pp-4.5 pp), declining to 3.2 pp in 2016 (range across specs. = 3.2 pp-4.2 pp), in counties suffering from coal mining job loss. The estimated electoral response is around three times as large as the number of jobs lost. We observe this response only in places where there was significant job loss, where these jobs accounted for a large share of locally available jobs and where income levels were low. Relative party strengths do not influence the results.
Policy goals, partisanship and paradigmatic change in energy policy – analyzing parliamentary discourse in Germany over 30 years
Schmidt, Tobias; Schmid, Nicolas; Sewerin, Sebastian (2019)
Climate Policy
Controller Tuning by Bayesian Optimization An Application to a Heat Pump
Khosravi, Mohammad; Eichler, Annika; Schmid, Nicolas; et al. (2019)
Proceedings of the 18th European Control Conference (ECC 2019)
In this paper, we consider the problem of controller tuning for an operating unit in a building energy system. As an illustrative plant example we focus on a heat pump. Since the plant is in use, the tuning method is supposed to not intervene with its operation. Moreover, the tuning procedure is supposed to be online, model-free, based only on historical data and needs to provide safety guarantees of the plant in operation. In this regard, we formulate the problem as a black-box optimization and adopt safe Bayesian optimization approaches for controller parameter tuning. These approaches are relatively new to the control community and not intensively studied in control applications. Meanwhile, the underlying systems are often expensive and performing relevant experiments is time consuming. Therefore, a crucial step prior to implementation in reality is validating the methods in simulation to verify their applicability. Toward this end, we derive a physical-based model for the heat pump and identify the unknown parameters using gray-box identification methods. Given the simulation model, we tune the controller parameters in simulation for optimal performance while considering safety constraints of the system.

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Nicolas Schmid

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