Sustainable Energy for Some? Value Creation and Distribution in the Energy Transition
Join UCL IIPP in conversation with Silvia Weko, Keno Haverkamp and Cecilia Rikap
Sustainable Energy for Some? Value Creation and Distribution in the Energy Transition
21 Jan 2025, 17:30 – 19:00
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Join this fascinating discussion on Tuesday 21st January 2025 at 17:30-19:00 (GMT) at University College London (UCL) and online on zoom.
About this talk:
Energy transitions are expected to redistribute economic benefits to new actors, from local communities to countries with renewable resources. My research explores the classic political economy question of who benefits, looking at the role of communities, states, and firms. At the community level, I look at attitudes towards energy transitions in Jordan, a lower-middle income country rapidly transitioning to renewables with attractive jobs in this industry. Despite the top-down nature of energy policymaking in the authoritarian political context, household surveys reveal that people are highly supportive of energy transitions, especially if they perceive renewables as benefitting their communities. However, there are tensions between countries and firms that make it difficult for countries to see the kinds of local benefits present in Jordan in many other contexts. I argue that the transfer of green technologies promised in the Paris Agreement is not materializing at a large scale, despite the demands of developing countries. Cases like Jordan and China where technology transfer has resulted in green industry-building are the exception, not the rule. This is because technological innovation gives firms competitive advantages in global value chains, and technology transfer has largely been left up to market mechanisms. An analysis of international tech transfer initiatives reveals that the majority are public-private partnerships, which indeed operate less frequently in countries business might deem unattractive. In fact, the energy transition magnifies the importance of innovation advantages, because clean energy systems are increasingly digitalized and intangibles-intensive. I therefore argue that the ‘winners’ of transitions may be Big Tech firms which have the potential to expand their existing monopolies on complementary intangible assets (especially data and AI). The case study of Amazon illustrates that such data-driven intellectual monopolies are playing an increasingly important role in the energy transition, providing the necessary digital infrastructures for the transition and developing their own innovations. The rise of Big Tech has implications for the international political economy of energy transitions, including narrowing windows of opportunity for technology transfer and local value creation, as well as geopolitical issues around energy autonomy and leadership in the clean tech race.
Meet the panel:
- Speaker: Silvia Weko | Postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
- Discussant: Keno Haverkamp | Research Associate at the Institute for Manufacturing | University of Cambridge
- Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap | Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
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[[{"fid":"15936","view_mode":"small","fields":{"format":"small","alignment":"left","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Silvia Weko","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][title]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][url]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_float_left_right[und]":"none","field_file_image_decorative[und]":"0"},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"small","alignment":"left","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Silvia Weko","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][title]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][url]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_float_left_right[und]":"none","field_file_image_decorative[und]":"0"}},"attributes":{"height":"533","width":"800","class":"media-element file-small media-wysiwyg-align-left"}}]]Silvia Weko is a postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research focuses the international politics of energy transitions, with a focus on innovation and technology ownership. From 2019-2023 she worked as a research associate with the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS). She completed her dissertation in 2023 at University of Erfurt, for which she was awarded second place in the social sciences section of the Deutsche Studienpreis, a competition for the best dissertation in Germany. She has been invited to speak on her research about Big Tech’s role in the energy transition at the German parliament, and provides policy advice to think tanks, policymakers and the media.
Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
[[{"fid":"14291","view_mode":"small","fields":{"format":"small","alignment":"left","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Cecilia","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][title]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][url]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_float_left_right[und]":"none","field_file_image_decorative[und]":"0"},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"small","alignment":"left","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Cecilia","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][title]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][url]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_float_left_right[und]":"none","field_file_image_decorative[und]":"0"}},"attributes":{"height":"200","width":"200","class":"media-element file-small media-wysiwyg-align-left"}}]]Cecilia Rikap (PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is associate professor in Economics and Head of Research at IIPP- UCL. Until joining UCL, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.
Cecilia’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. She has published two books on these topics. 1) “Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism uncovered” (Routledge), recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition. 2) “The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order” (Palgrave), co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall, focuses on the artificial intelligence race and clashes of power between the US and Chinese Big Tech, the US state and the Chinese states. Her recent work includes corporate planning of global production and innovation systems driven by intellectual monopolization and how these leading corporations, in particular tech giants, are developing state-like features, thus reshaping core and peripheral states.
[[{"fid":"11005","view_mode":"small","fields":{"format":"small","alignment":"left","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Keno Haverkamp","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][title]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][url]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_float_left_right[und]":"none","field_file_image_decorative[und]":"0"},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"small","alignment":"left","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Keno Haverkamp","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][title]":"","field_caption_heading[und][0][url]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_float_left_right[und]":"none","field_file_image_decorative[und]":"0"}},"attributes":{"height":"350","width":"350","class":"media-element file-small media-wysiwyg-align-left"}}]]Keno Haverkamp is a Research Associate at the Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge. His research focusses on Green Industrial Policies and the political economy thereof.
He is particularly interested in the manufacturing aspects of Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) and the lessons to be learnt for development economics. His wider research interests include the political economy of development, structural change, innovation, premature deindustrialisation, and the role of the state in development.
Before joining IIPP, Keno worked as a Research Economist for the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) in Vienna. He holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and a B.Sc. in International Business and Politics from the Copenhagen Business School.
Keno’s PhD is funded through a research project where he works for the OECD Observatory for Public Sector Innovation on challenge-driven innovation policies and organisations in Europe. As of 2021 he teaches in IIPP’s Master of Public Administration module Creative Bureaucracies and is coordinating IIPP’s Theory Reading Group.
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