The Green Challenge: Exploring Explanations of Russia’s Renewable Energy Policies

Russia only recently developed a renewable energy policy. In 2009, Russia’s Energy Strategy for the first time set the goal to achieve 4.5 percent of the total electricity produced and consumed on the basis of renewable energy sources by 2020. In 2013, the Russian government implemented the first support scheme in the form of an annual tender to stimulate investments in new renewable capacity. If the support scheme will be fully implemented, 5.871 GW of new solar, wind and small hydro will come online on Russia's wholesale capacity market by 2020.

This emerging renewable energy policy requires further investigation into its enabling and constraining factors. Since the country has limited traditional drivers to develop renewable energy sources (RES) such as insufficient indigenous fossil fuel reserves and import dependence on fossil fuels, divergent motives might explain Russia’s development of a renewable energy policy. Relatively low electricity prices and the current oversupply on the wholesale electricity market further question the economic drivers. The environmental driver to invest in renewable energy sources can also be challenged, since several authors find that the green movement in Russia is too fragmented (Yanitsky, 2005), the signing of Kyoto had been instigated by pragmatic reasons (Henry & Sundstrom, 2007), and Russia’s environmental policy has been disintegrating since the second half of the nineties (Mol, 2009).

Moreover, policy changes do not necessarily translate into changes in investment behavior. Therefore, this research project seeks to analyse various enabling and constraining factors of Russia’s renewable energy policy throughout the entire policy cycle – from goal setting to actual implementation. Are the goals as declared in political discourse being followed by rigorous policy implementation? On the basis of a discourse analysis that is being tested against a policy analysis, the research project identifies four structural dimensions that – to a different extent and depending on the policy phase – influence Russia’s renewable energy policy in the period between 2009 and 2016. Informed by interviews with stakeholders (green energy companies, governmental institutions, environmental NGOs, gas companies), this research sheds light behind the scenes of Russia's renewable energy policy making and shaping.