From Competition Law to Competing States: State Aid Law, EU Internal Market Rules, and the Normative Race for Renewables

The evolution of EU law has undoubtedly contributed to facilitating the development of renewable energy, exerting continuous pressure on EU Member States to create support mechanisms and incentives policies towards renewable energy industries. Notwithstanding the tangible results achieved by the EU energy policy in this respect, this paper aims to reveal that the very design of such a policy laid the foundations for the emergence of a regulatory competition within the EU, with EU Member States being encouraged to compete with each other by using their national legal systems to attract renewable energy investments to their territory. While, in principle, regulatory competition between Member States is unlikely to emerge within the EU Legal Order, which mostly relies on the convergence between national laws rather than a competition between them, this paper supports the hypothesis that, in the field of renewable energy, the EU has chosen and even stimulated, regulatory competition to ensure the development of renewable energy at the European scale. By using the theoretical framework of regulatory competition to observe the relationships between EU Member States, this paper opens new perspective to question the efficiency of the EU’s ability to achieve its ambition towards energy transition without disregarding the resilience of its legal order.