Business Models for Prosumers in Europe

This report explores the different business models being adopted to enable renewable energy generation and self-consumption in the European Union. Individuals, businesses and energy communities that install renewable energy generation and self-consume some of that generation are called ‘prosumers’. Prosumers may be householders, businesses or communities whose primary business is not energy generation. The price of installing on-site renewables is falling, which means homes and businesses can increasingly afford the up-front cost of installing a system. At the same time, governments are removing the subsidies formerly paid to prosumers for feeding renewable energy into the grid. In parallel, energy systems are getting smarter, so it is becoming easier to account for smaller and smaller amounts of energy and to trade them between smaller players in the energy market; even down to household to household trades. The recent Clean Energy Package (CEP) for All Europeans enshrines the rights of European citizens to become individual and/or collective prosumers. Collective prosumers are defined in the Clean Energy Package by two new types of organisation; Renewable Energy Communities and Citizen Energy Communities who are empowered to generate, use and to sell energy collectively, between themselves. How these Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) and Citizen Energy Communities (CECs) are established in each Member State (MS) is a matter for each MS’s energy policy and regulation. This report explores why these RECs and CECs are necessary, what kinds of value they might be trying to capture in the energy transition, and how they can be empowered through MS’ energy policy and regulation. To do this we investigated the business models being adopted by individual and collective prosumers

Collective renewable energy prosumers and the promises of the energy union: Taking stock

A key strategy in the European Union’s ambition to establish an ‘Energy Union’ that is not just clean, but also fair, consists of empowering citizens to actively interact with the energy market as self-consumers or prosumers. Although renewable energy sources (RES) prosumerism has been growing for at least a decade, two new EU directives are intended to legitimise and facilitate its expansion. However, little is known about the full range of prosumers against which to measure policy effectiveness. We carried out a documentary study and an online survey in nine EU countries to shed light on the demographics, use of technology, organisation, financing, and motivation as well as perceived hindering and facilitating factors for collective prosumers. We identified several internal and external obstacles to the successful mainstreaming of RES prosumerism, among them a mismatch of policies with the needs of different RES prosumer types, potential organisational weaknesses as well as slow progress in essential reforms such as decentralising energy infrastructures. Our baseline results offer recommendations for the transposition of EU directives into national legislations and suggest avenues for future research in the fields of social, governance, policy, technology, and business models

Concepts, formats, and methods of participation: theory and practice

New energies form new energy landscapes (Apostol, Palmer, Pasqualetti, Smardon, & Sullivan, 2016; Gailing & Leibenath, 2013). Energy carriers converge within space and open up leeway and scope for design. Different spaces are affected: offshore and onshore, plains and mountains, waters, volcanic areas, coastal regions, deserts, etc. Different energy sources and types of technology are used and integrated through grids. Grids are increasingly governed as smart energy systems equipped with smart meters and apps etc., linked with smart mobility

Energy transition and civic engagement

This chapter gives an overview of various forms of civic engagement in the context of the German energy transition. The first section introduces invented and invited spaces of civic participation with a focus on bottom-up citizens’ activities, their dynamics, and social structure. To this end, community energy initiatives such as energy cooperatives as well as protests against wind turbines and grid expansion are analyzed regarding fields of conflict, forms of representation, and collaboration and matters of (energy) justice. The normative roles attributed to citizens’ activities and polarization tendencies are critically discussed. In conclusion, two elementary forms of civic engagement relating to the Energiewende can be derived