The Potential for Energy Citizens in the European Union

27 September 2016

With an increasing share of renewable energy sources (RES) in the European Union (EU), the role of energy consumers as active participants in the energy system is bound to expand, as the developments in an increasing number of EU Member States demonstrate.

A growing number of households, public organizations and small enterprises are likely to produce energy, supply demand-side flexibility or store energy in times of oversupply.

So far, however, the extent of this prosumer potential in the EU is unknown. Global and EU-wide decarbonisation scenarios typically model increasing RES capacities, but do not go into the details of how this is achieved, and what role prosumers, also referred to as energy citizens, could play in these developments.

This study therefore aims to create more insight into the potential of energy citizens in the EU: how many energy citizens could there be in 2030 and 2050 throughout the EU and what is their potential contribution to renewable energy production and demand side flexibility?

The main result of this project is an Excel workbook that contains the detailed quantitative findings of this study. This report provides the background information to these data, describing the context of the study and the methodology used. The study was commissioned by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth Europe, European Renewable Energy Federation (EREF) and REScoop.