Prof. Knodt, Prof. Schulze, Dr. Friedrich Plank und Mile Misic stellen auf der DVPW Themengruppen Tagung „Energiepolitik in Zeiten des Krieges“

For many European countries, the Russian war on Ukraine has essentially eliminated the option of using natural gas as a bridging technology while transitioning away from other fossil fuels such as oil and coal towards a fully renewable energy system. Where gas imports from Russia cannot be easily replaced, high hopes are being placed on importing renewable energy, especially from sunshine and wind abundant countries. A number of technologies to store and transport renewable energy have been proposed, including hydrogen but also other chemical carriers such as metals and its oxides. However, with the energy trilemma of cost effectiveness, security, and sustainability in mind, it is unclear which countries to choose as partners for green energy imports. In this paper, we focus on the case of Germany and the possibility of using iron as a carbon-free carrier of renewable energy to develop a multidimensional approach to assess and compare green energy import options. Our approach combines multiple criteria along four dimensions focusing on (1) economic, (2) sustainability, (3) regulation, and (4) cooperation and innovation related aspects of green energy imports. We conduct an exploratory factor analysis on a global country sample to probe the validity of our concept and find meaningful variability among our indicator variables highlighting the utility of our multidimensional concept. The concept advances our understanding of trade-offs between the energy trilemma’s goals sustainability, competitiveness and security of supply.