Collective Renewable Energy Prosumers and the Promises of the Energy Union: Taking Stock

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

  • Lanka Horstink
  • Julia M. Wittmeyer
  • Kiat Ng
  • Guilherme Pontes Luz
  • Esther Marín-González
  • Swantje Gährs
  • Inês Campos
  • Lars Holstenkamp
  • Sem Oxenaar
  • Donal Brown
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.
Titel in ÜbersetzungKollektive Erneuerbare-Energien-Prosumer und die Versprechungen der Europäischen Union: Eine Bestandsaufnahme
OriginalspracheEnglisch
Aufsatznummer421
ZeitschriftEnergies
Jahrgang13
Ausgabenummer2
Anzahl der Seiten30
ISSN1996-1073
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 15.01.2020

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
The research leading to the results presented in this article has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº764056. K.N. was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) postdoctoral fellowship grant (SFRH/BPD/120394/2016). The authors wish to thank the following researchers for their contribution to the data collection and to the discussion that formed the basis of the present analysis: Mark Soares (UPORTO); Jeremie Fosse (ECO-UNION); Kristian Petrick (ECO-UNION); Mireia Reus (ECO-UNION); Thijs Scholten (CE Delft); Bettina Kampman (CE Delft); Mark Davis (ULeeds); Stephen Hall (ULeeds); Arthur Hinsch (ICLEI); Marta Toporek (CLIENTEARTH); Michele Zuin (ICLEI); Moritz Ehrtmann (LEUPHANA); Tomislav Novosel (UNIZAG); Tomislav Puksec (UNIZAG); and Ana Lovrak (UNIZAG).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the authors

Zugehörige Projekte

  • PROSEU - PROSumers for the Energy Union: mainstreaming active participation of citizens in the energy transition

    Projekt: Forschung

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DOI