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.
Highlights
The European Commission (EC) is spearheading the EU’s plan to ‘lead the clean energy transition, adapt to it’ [1]
Reviewing nine EU countries as well as the EU as a whole, we found that differences in the take-up of renewable energy sources (RES) prosumerism can be attributed among others to the varying investment in RES [17], energy path dependencies related to the natural resources available in the different countries, as well as cultural factors (e.g., [19,20])
We showed earlier that official country numbers for the shares of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption maintain wind energy as the leading RES technology, the trend encountered in our results—with photovoltaic PV leading the RES technology choices—may be explained by the fact that the growth of wind energy has occurred largely independently from prosumerism, with projects mostly developed by energy companies [49]
Summary
The European Commission (EC) is spearheading the EU’s plan to ‘lead the clean energy transition, adapt to it’ [1]. Review of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) Prosumerism. Despite the advances made in restructuring the legislative and policy framework to prepare the EU’s clean energy transition, Campos et al [22] highlighted considerable disparities in legislative and policy support for RES prosumerism in different EU countries, resulting in varying levels of prosumer development. A key challenge is the imposition of new definitions and rules for individuals as well as collective forms of RES prosumerism that, besides falling short of representing the full diversity of prosumer initiatives sprouting up [10,23,24,25], is prone to different interpretations in the subsequent transposition to national legislations, a process that must mandatorily be concluded in 2021
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