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Political decision making and legislation are favoring the use of renewable energy sources in electricity markets in many European countries. One of these countries is Germany, which electricity market is examined in this thesis. Therefore, renewable energy generation has increased significantly during the past decades. These environmentally friendly energy sources cause challenges to electricity markets. Compared to fossil fuels renewable energy is intermittent and not easily adjustable to electricity demand. Thus, understanding how renewables impact electricity prices is essential. The objective of this thesis is to examine the impacts of wind and solar energy production on day-ahead electricity prices in Germany. The data used in this thesis is from German markets and covers the period from January 2015 to December 2019. All the data is from the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, which is an online data transparency platform for European electricity system data. The identification method used in this thesis is fixed effects model, which is regression model that is suitable for panel data set. Five independent variables are included in the model, and wind and solar power generation are examined separately in this thesis. The results of this thesis suggest that increased amounts of wind power feed-in decreases electricity prices. These results are in line with the previous studies. However, the magnitude on wind production price impact was more modest compared to previous studies. Results of solar power generation were more surprising, as it seemed to have slightly positive impact on day-ahead electricity prices. However, it is worth noticing that estimates were not statistically significant at 0.1 significance level, and according to robustness checks results varied. Robustness checks with other variables support obtained results. Comparison between results of wind and solar power price impacts showed that wind power generation has a greater impact on day-ahead electricity prices. This observation is in line with most of the previous literature.

In the light of increasing socio-ecological crises, there has been a surge in the promotion of, and investments in, renewable energy in the Global South. Previous theories and research, largely framed around conservative and liberal paradigms, have hailed these developments as a breakthrough. Yet, just sustainability theorists have pointed to logically plausible problems in these alternatives, suggesting that they do not go far enough and could, indeed, worsen the present crises. From these critiques, the conservative and liberal advocacy of a shift towards a low-carbon society does not, and cannot, automatically guarantee just sustainabilities. Although controversial, neither conservative, liberal, nor just sustainability theorists have empirically ascertained these claims about the nature of sustainable development. Africa’s largest wind power plant, the Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) project in Kenya, provides a useful case study for this purpose. In addressing this lacuna, this thesis attempts to answer two fundamental questions related to the project. First, which are the dominant discourses on the LTWP project in Kenya? and second, what are the prospects of these discourses to drive just sustainability in Kenya? To address these questions, a range of rich data was collected, consisting of eight semi-structured interviews with key informants in Kenya and Finland, written documents including 12 news and feature articles, two policy documents and one company impact assessment. The data was systematised using critical discourse analysis (CDA) set within a political-economic framework of just sustainabilities in which wind power is dialectically linked to the dominant fossil fuel system built on global inequalities. Based on this methodology, this thesis argues that not only is the LTWP project not regarded as an environmental sustainability initiative, it is mostly understood as satisfying economic needs. More fundamentally, as the LTWP is realised within the dominant capitalist frame, guided by a reliance on market forces, new technologies and a search for new frontiers of capital accumulation, processes that are erected on, and typically drive, local and global inequalities, it does not address wider concerns of inclusion, raised by representatives for local communities in Northern Kenyan in the semi-structured interviews. Analytically, this evidence shows that mainstream conservative and liberal theories of development and energy are insufficient for analysing the transition from fossil to alternative fuels, let alone provide a canvass for a total liberation of the Global South. Clearly, the political economy of LTWP also calls into question the objectives of donor nations involved in the project as financiers. This evidence provides further basis to put the case for understanding alternative energy projects, particularly the LTWP under study, within a much broader framework of alternative, radical theories of just sustainabilities centred on concepts such as just land.