Max Willems Defends Dissertation on Distributional Conflicts in Energy Transition 

Max Willems successfully defended his dissertation, “Pricing Power: The Political Economy of Renewable Energy Transitions in Europe,” at the University of Duisburg-Essen on October 2, 2026. In his study, he asks who wins and who loses from decarbonization, and why. While research has long focused on “green” vs. “brown” interests, more recent climate politics scholarship has increasingly conceptualized climate policy as distributional bargaining between corporate actors and the state. The electricity sector is central to these negotiations, yet to date it has received only limited attention in political economy as a site of distributional conflict. This is the starting point for Willems’ study. He argues that electricity prices are highly political, since market design, subsidies, tariff structures, and network charging regulation are subject to political decisions and all affect producer and consumer groups very differently. Governments use electricity pricing to promote social equity, recover policy costs, and pursue industrial policy objectives. Even in the common European electricity market, distributional effects differ significantly between countries. Willems draws out these differences by tracing negotiations on the costs and benefits of renewable energy policy in Germany, Sweden, Spain, and the United Kingdom since the mid-1990s. He argues that variation between them reflects the ability of key economic actors to establish access to low electricity prices as being essential to their respective national growth model. The dissertation was supervised by Lucio Baccaro. Max Willems was a doctoral researcher at the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE), the MPIfG’s graduate school, from 2022. He will take up a postdoc position at the Environmental Change Institute of the University of Oxford in November of this year.