The UK and German Low-Carbon Industry Transitions from a Sectoral Innovation and System Failures Perspective

Abstract

Industrial processes are associated with high amounts of energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted, stressing the urgent need for low-carbon sectoral transitions. This research reviews the energy-intensive iron and steel, cement and chemicals industries of Germany and the United Kingdom, two major emitting countries with significant activity, yet with different recent orientation. Our socio-technical analysis, based on the Sectoral Innovation Systems and the Systems Failure framework, aims to capture existing and potential drivers of or barriers to diffusion of sustainable industrial technologies and extract implications for policy. Results indicate that actor structures and inconsistent policies have limited low-carbon innovation. A critical factor for the successful decarbonisation of German industry lies in overcoming lobbying and resistance to technological innovation caused by strong networks. By contrast, a key to UK industrial decarbonisation is to drive innovation and investment in the context of an industry in decline and in light of Brexit-related uncertainty.

Sustainable Manufacture of Bearing Bushing Parts

“…Disturbing factors are those whose values cannot be adjusted by users but can influence the output parameters' values. Research concerns have sought to address sustainability issues as a system, using principles from the systemic analysis [12][13][14][15][16]. In the case of the problem addressed in this paper, i.e., the sustainable manufacture of technology for finishing the inner surfaces of bearing bushes, the use of systemic analysis will have to facilitate the identification of those factors capable of affecting the accuracy of the inner surface of the bearing bushing by applying a finishing turning.…”

Expert perceptions of game-changing innovations towards net zero

“…Iron and steel constitute the most energy-demanding industries, accounting for approximately 4% of European emissions [63] and 7% of global CO 2 emissions [64]. These industries have even been termed a 'special case' for economic activities, as both combustion and process emissions must be addressed [65,66]. Deep decarbonisation of the iron and steel sectors could be achieved via the use of carbon-free electricity sources, specifically via use of electrolysis of iron ore [57].…”

Innovation, Technology Development and Transfer

“…Notably the innovation systems approach has been used in a number of climate-relevant areas such as agriculture (Echeverría 1998;Horton and Mackay 2003;Brooks and Loevinsohn 2011;Klerkx et al 2012), energy (Sagar and Holdren 2002;OECD 2006;Gallagher et al 2012;Wieczorek et al 2013;Darmani et al 2014;Mignon and Bergek 2016), industry (Koasidis et al 2020b) and transport (Koasidis et al 2020a), and sustainable development (Anadon et al 2016b;Clark et al 2016;Bryden and Gezelius 2017;Nikas et al 2020).…”