TY - JOUR A1 - Müller-Hansen, Finn A1 - Callaghan, Max W. A1 - Lee, Yuan Ting A1 - Leipprand, Anna A1 - Flachsland, Christian A1 - Minx, Jan C. T1 - Who cares about coal? Analyzing 70 years of German parliamentary debates on coal with dynamic topic modeling JF - Energy Research & Social Science N2 - Despite Germany’s Paris Agreement pledge and coal exit legislation, the political debate around carbon-intensive coal remains heated. Coal power and mining have played an important, yet changing role in the history of German politics. In this paper, we analyze the entire parliamentary debate on coal in the German parliament (Bundestag) from its inception in 1949 to 2019. For this purpose we extract the more than 870,000 parliamentary speeches from all protocols in the history of the Bundestag. We identify the 9167 speeches mentioning coal and apply dynamic topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique that reveals the changing thematic structure of large document collections over time – to analyze changes in parliamentary debates on coal over the past 70 years. The trends in topics and their varying internal structure reflect how energy policy was discussed and legitimized over time: Initially, coal was framed as a driver of economic prosperity and guarantee of energy security. In recent years, the debate evolved towards energy transition, coal phase-out and renewable energy expansion. Germany’s smaller and younger parties, the Greens and the Left Party, debate coal more often in the context of the energy transition and climate protection than other parties. Our results reflect trends in other countries and other fields of energy policy. Methodologically, our study illustrates the potential of and need for computational methods to analyze vast corpora of text and to complement traditional social science methods. KW - Coal transition KW - Energy policy KW - Parliamentary debates KW - Topic modeling KW - Computational text analysis Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101869 VL - 72 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tiedemann, Silvana A1 - Müller-Hansen, Finn T1 - Auctions to phase out coal power: Lessons learned from Germany JF - Energy Policy N2 - This study assesses the extent to which auctions for compensation payments are a suitable policy instrument for ending coal-fired power generation at minimum cost and thus achieving national climate targets. Germany is the first country to apply such a market-based mechanism. Evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the auction, we find that the first five of seven auction rounds will retire 10 GW of coal-fired capacity at a cost of 68 ± 5 EUR/kW, corresponding to an additional carbon price of 2.4 ± 0.2 EUR/tCO2. The possibility of administratively shutting down power plants from 2024 and a decreasing ceiling price have ensured that average compensation payments are well below the ceiling price, and low compared to other policies, even though there was no competition in two of five auction rounds. As the government cancels the freed emission allowances, the policy will result in lower emissions, even though the carbon intensity of the German coal power fleet increased slightly by 2%. Thus, the German auctions can serve as a model for national phase-out strategies in countries with similar institutional frameworks and provide a reference case for integrating conflicting policy objectives into auctions. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113387 VL - 174 ER -