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The expansion of photovoltaics in German cities has so far fallen short of expectations. The concept of ‘tenant electricity’ (‘Mieterstrom’ in German), in which tenants of a building are supplied with solar power produced on site, offers great potential here. A study on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy estimated the number of tenant households with good conditions for solar tenant electricity at 3.8 million. At the same time, the federal tenant electricity promotion scheme has been in place since 2017, but only about 1% of the annual budget has been claimed. The aim of this study is to identify the barriers for and drivers of diffusion of the tenant electricity model. To this end, a qualitative document analysis and a range of semi-structured expert interviews have been conducted. The theoretical framework used to guide the analysis is the multi-level perspective. The main barrier found for tenant electricity diffusion is the legal framework on the regime level, which also leads to high transaction costs of implementing tenant electricity. A social barrier is the inertia of some residents to actively concern themselves with their electricity supply and switch to a tenant electricity contract. Among its drivers are long-term trends such as the increasing electricity demand in urban areas, technical developments like blockchain technology and the increasing deployment of smart meters, and the EU Renewable Energy Directive. As long as the restrictive legal framework prevails, the further diffusion of tenant electricity will remain limited.

Modern enterprises of all sizes operate in global manufacturing networks and complex global supply chains. Because sustainability is now a major concern, global manufacturing enterprises must optimize their global supply chain over multiple objectives including sustainability. It is important for such enterprises to analyze their global supply chain across all the three pillars of sustainability (society, economy and environment) when making a distribution network decision. A cradle-to-gate approach is taken, which means this decision can depend on the manufacturing site, all its suppliers, raw material source and transportation right until the customer gate. In this article, a multi-objective optimization model is presented that provides a rigorous method to optimize over all the three pillars of sustainability using a cradle-to-gate approach.

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