No their conclusion is as follow:
6. Conclusion
This paper contributes to the on-going debate on the feasibility of rapid energy transitions to mitigate climate change. Our focus is to examine whether and how climate policies have so far altered the nature and speed of energy transitions beyond historical trends, and analyse the implications for future transitions. To achieve this, we developed a new approach to systematically categorise, trace, and compare energy transitions across countries and time-periods. We applied this approach to analyse the historical electricity transitions in the G7 countries and the EU where the majority of climate policies has been introduced. We also compared this historical observation to the required transition to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5°C.
We find that the impacts of climate policies on energy transitions have been limited: while they may have influenced the choice of deployed technologies and thereby affected the type of transitions, they have not accelerated the speed beyond historical trends in the G7 and the EU. Instead, electricity transitions have strongly correlated with the changes in electricity demand throughout the last six decades. The recent growth of low-carbon electricity with modern renewables remains 50% slower as compared to the historically fastest speed achieved in 1980–1985 with nuclear power when climate policies were largely absent. The recent decline of fossil fuels in the G7 and the EU has therefore been facilitated by the overall decrease in electricity demand, enabling the substitution by relatively slowly growing renewables.
Meeting the decarbonised electricity target by 2035 in the G7 and the EU is extremely challenging. It requires to achieve immediate and unprecedented supply-centred transitions, with rates and duration of technological growth and decline that have never been observed simultaneously in history. None of these countries achieved such transitions in 2020–2022; in fact, in most of the G7 countries and the EU, more fossil fuels were added and low-carbon electricity generation stagnated and declined, making the achievement of the target even more difficult. Counteracting this trend and meeting the target, therefore, requires unprecedented and drastically different measures rather than incremental changes including finding and enforcing new mechanisms to develop low-carbon electricity and to facilitate a more rapid and continuous decline of fossil fuels.
There are several limitations to our study, which call for further research. First, it is important to note that the G7 countries and the EU are heavily industrialised economies, which may not necessarily represent energy transitions in other countries. Existing literature, however, debates on whether the rest of the countries, particularly those in the global south, can sufficiently develop without industrialisation and the increased use of fossil fuels [58,61]. Therefore, more research is necessary to investigate the similarities and differences in their development trajectories and potential future paths, and the role of policies in them.
Second, while we do not find evidence that the increased number of climate policies has correlated with faster or radically different energy transitions, this does not mean climate policies did not have effects. It is possible that the effects of climate policies were cancelled out by confounding factors including other policies and non-policy factors. To precisely isolate the effects of climate policies, one would need to either compare situations identical in all aspects except the presence of climate policies (but finding such ideal natural experiments is very difficult) or trace causal mechanisms connecting climate policies to energy transition outcomes. This is an important area for future studies.
As a concrete example for such investigation, while we show that low-carbon electricity grew slower in the recent decades in the G7 and the EU, a more comprehensive analysis is necessary to examine its underlying causes. In particular, it is crucial to investigate why, despite the significant increase in climate policies and substantial cost reductions, modern renewables have not developed faster than nuclear power in the past. Given that only France and Sweden achieved the necessary growth rate of low-carbon electricity through the deployment of nuclear power in the 1970–1980s, it is important to investigate whether and how a similar level of acceleration can be replicated in today’s more liberalised and democratised energy markets. More broadly, the role of democracy in energy transitions requires further scrutiny as its effects are contested in the literature, ranging from slowing down to accelerating sustainable transitions [[88], [89], [90]].
To conclude, climate policies have so far had limited impacts on energy transitions in the G7 and the EU, significantly falling short of the required transition to meet climate targets. Further work is necessary to examine whether this is the case in other countries as well as other sectors. The systematic comparative approach we developed in this paper can be useful for future studies for example to analyse energy transitions in developing countries or to examine the progress of transitions in other sectors such as transport (e.g. e-mobility), buildings (e.g. net-zero buildings), and industry (e.g. low-carbon steel and cement production). This approach also enables identifying historically relevant cases for future transitions, as we demonstrated particularly in Section 4.4. Only through systematic identification and thorough examination of these cases, while exploring ways to replicate and potentially expedite their rate of acceleration, can we address the questions that remain underexplored in the literature: ‘What does it take?’ [31], and ‘How much does it cost?’ [9] to mitigate climate change, including the feasibility and desirability of these actions.
