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

Abstract

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.

Empowering Vulnerable Consumers to Join Renewable Energy Communities—Towards an Inclusive Design of the Clean Energy Package

“…Providing vulnerable consumers with access to the "enabling framework" which includes subsidy schemes to engage in prosumption has energy justice implications as well: The benefits prosumption offers as a result of certain policies should be distributed equally to all social groups in turn increasing social acceptance and political support for the transition itself [19,20]. However, prosumership as mentioned requires a number of prerequisites including access to financing, know-how, a certain willingness to take risks [21]. Especially if one has limited experiences as a (co-)owner the prospect of long-term investments including loans, requirements for maintenance, insecurity in regulatory frameworks (changed in feed-in tariffs) and vague yield expectations in the distant future amount to highly context specific barriers many of which are reinforced by a multidimensional vulnerability.…”

Distributed Energy Systems and Energy Communities Under Negotiation

“…Walker (2011) showed that ECs can vary depending on their location, the relationships between involved members, and whether they are virtual or physical. The literature usually describes ECs as established to produce and consume energy (Horstink et al, 2020;Magnusson & Palm, 2018), but some ECs engage in energy activities beyond production (Caramizaru & Uihlein, 2020). Gui and MacGill (2018) claimed that ECs can also participate in activities such as transport, water supply, and waste management in order to produce social, environmental, and economic bene ts for different types of communities.…”

New Methods for Improved Prosumer Trading and Energy Poverty Mitigation in Microgrids using Crowdsourcing Concepts and Blockchain Technologies

“…As it was presented in the introduction section, in Europe there are currently over 3400 green energy cooperatives (REScoop). In accordance with [23][24][25][26], the REScoop notion is defined in EU directives, as "local energy communities", according to data from the Federation of Green Energy Cooperatives in Europe. More than one million European citizens are participating in REScoops to invest together in the energy transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and energy efficiency.…”

“…In addition, the last column considers the type of settlement used in the market. [24,25], [44], [49] No No No Yes No Negotiated [26,27] Yes No No Yes No Negotiated [30][31][32], [35], [38], [42] No Yes No No No Negotiated, MCP [33,34], [36,37], [43], [45] Our vision is to enable an overlay social network of smart devices that facilitates communication and trading process between players from LEM, prosumers, consumers and microgrid. Indubitably in microgrid communities the peers might be from different geographical locations (and bounded by, for example, the DSO).…”

“…From the 27 consumers existing in the microgrid, the case study considers that only 11 are participating in the primary market as buyers (from buses 5, 8, 9,11,12,14,16,19,20,24,26), chosen mainly between the residences with high daily electricity demand. For each hour h, they can submit to the market two type of offers regarding the traded quantity: the entire hourly demand and forecasted values, multiple of 100 kW, as discussed in Section 3.2.…”