Abstract
The German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) has been deemed successful in promoting German biogas production. However, the German state-level biogas production development (BPD) under the EEG has not been systematically studied and compared. This research aimed to study the German state-level BPD using the multivariate linear regression model with a dummy variable, and to spatially quantify the environmental and agricultural consequences using the geographic information system (GIS) technique to identify the necessities of regional-based analysis on Germany’s BPD. The empirical results indicated that Saxony-Anhalt was advanced in BPD, while farmers’ response from Bavaria to EEG was the weakest. The reason behind could be the differences in farmers’ personality traits and risk cognitions toward the biogas production investment. The spatial analysis indicated that Saxony-Anhalt had more severe environmental problems caused by the biogas production expansion than Bavaria. Therefore, to promote BPD in states such as Bavaria, an increase in the nationwide unified subsidy might lead to an overreaction of the EEG strong response states, e.g., Saxony-Anhalt, leading to more serious environmental problems. In the end, there is a need for more regional-based research on studying the BPD in Germany in the future to avoid the ambiguity of large-scale studies.
Highlights
In order to promote the German energy transition (Energiewende), the GermanyRenewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) went into effect as one pillar of the climate protection policies in 2000 [1]
This study contributed to the current literature of biogas production development under Germany’s energy transition by comparing the German state-level biogas production development during the studied period from 2000 to 2015, after accounting for the exogenous effects
Apart from other reasons such as scales of farms, development of livestock farming, and state-level support, this could be due to the diversities of farmers’ personality traits and risk cognitions, which led to different attitudes toward the biogas production investment
Summary
Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) went into effect as one pillar of the climate protection policies in 2000 [1]. Bioenergy has been widely considered as a significant contributor to global renewable energy production [3]. The core measure of EEG to promote biogas production is a nationwide unified remuneration scheme that provides the plant operators a guaranteed price for the generated electricity for 20 years [2,5,6]. This financial support has efficiently motivated the farmers to adopt the biogas plants Germany-wide in the last two decades. The cultivation area of silage maize for biogas production increased substantially from less than 200,000 to around 900,000 ha during the period from 2007 to 2018 [9]
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