This deliverable reports back with findings based on work carried out in PROSEU Work Package 2- Baseline analysis and Characterisation of Renewable Energy Prosumer Initiatives. Specifically, it integrates the results of Tasks 2.1 (baseline review and stakeholder identification) and 2.2 (survey of RES prosumer initiatives across Europe) to provide a snapshot and characterisation of RES prosumer initiatives across Europe. ; H2020 project PROSEU - Prosumers for the Energy Union: Mainstreaming active participation of citizens in the energy transition. Work package 2 (WP2) - Baseline analysis and Characterization of RE Prosumer Initiatives
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.
This deliverable develops a comprehensive overview of the incentive structures that shape the mainstreaming of RES prosumerism. The Incentive Structures Framework (ISF) presented here identifies and describes 17 key societal conditions, classified along the three clusters of regulatory-financial conditions, technological-material conditions and cultural-discursive conditions. The relevance is empirically substantiated through brief summaries of observations from PROSEU thematic work packages, Living Labs, and survey results. The ISF also clarifies how these societal conditions can give rise to different forms of RES prosumerism and to tensions and crossroads in the mainstreaming process. The ISF is substantiated through three analyses of political-economical, technological-infrastructural, and organisational crossroads in the mainstreaming process. ; H2020 project PROSEU - Prosumers for the Energy Union: Mainstreaming active participation of citizens in the energy transition. Work package 6 (WP6) - Participatory Integrated Assessment of Incentive Structures
