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

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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.
Translated title of the contributionKollektive Erneuerbare-Energien-Prosumer und die Versprechungen der Europäischen Union: Eine Bestandsaufnahme
Original languageEnglish
Article number421
JournalEnergies
Volume13
Issue number2
Number of pages30
ISSN1996-1073
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15.01.2020

Bibliographical note

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

    Research areas

  • Management studies
  • renewable energy prosumer, energy transition, collective prosumer, energy union, community energy

Documents

DOI