Methode

Prosumers

PROSEU project

CE Delft was one of eleven partners from seven European countries that have worked together on the PROSEU-project during the last three years (2018 – 2021). The PROSEU-project is an EU-funded project that aims to enable the mainstreaming of the renewable energy prosumer phenomenon into the European Energy Union. Prosumers are active energy users who both produce and consume energy from renewable sources.

PROSEU’s research focused on collectives of RE Prosumers and investigated new business models, market regulations, social aspects of prosumerism, technology scenarios and energy policies across Europe. The project resulted in a wealth of reports and publications, all deliverables of the project can be found on the website https://proseu.eu.

Role of CE Delft

CE Delft worked on several tasks within this project, most notably on the following. The main deliverable that CE Delft worked on is the report on local, national and EU scenarios for prosumers, where we focussed on the technical potential of prosumers in Europe. Based on our previous prosumers modelling work, we developed a model, CEPROM, to assess this potential. We created different scenarios to calculate the future electricity and heat demand, the potential for prosumer production capacities and energy production and the potential degree of self-sufficiency of prosumers. More about this work below.

We also contributed to the report on technical recommendations for prosumer communities, were involved in an extensive survey of prosumers (which resulted in this report) and in the development of an up-to-date database of the key characteristics of different prosumer technologies. Furthermore, we worked on several living labs, in which actual prosumer projects were supported. In that context, we carried out an assessment of the CO2-footprint of Aardehuis Olst, a prosumer project in the Netherlands. The results can be found here,

Prosumer scenarios for the EU

In our prosumer modelling work, we consider three  types of prosumers: individual households, collectives and the tertiary sector. The CEPROM model includes a broad range of technologies, both for electricity and heating/cooling,  and takes three different scenarios into account:

  • Reference scenario, which represents ‘business as usual’.
  • Maximum Renewables scenario, in which prosumers generate as much renewable energy as possible, without storing this energy. The calculated production of the prosumers corresponds to the technical potential. Social and financial constraints are not taken into account.
  • Maximum Self-sufficiency scenario, which uses the same assumptions as the Maximum Renewables scenario, but also includes energy storage to increase self-consumption of the generated energy.

The Reference scenario provides results for 2015, 2030 and 2050, the other two only look forward, to 2030 and 2050.

Results

The results of our study on the technical potential of prosumers are included in the PROSEU report on local, national and EU scenarios for prosumers mentioned above, together with modelling results of prosumers on a local or regional scale, which was carried out by two of our project partners.  To make the EU-level results more accessible we also drafted a separate report, which only focuses on our part of the research. Along with this report, an Excel sheet is published on this website, which shows all the results of the CEPROM scenarios that were developed. Both can be downloaded from this website.

The model shows that in 2050, up to 89% of electricity demand of households can be generated by the households themselves. Electricity production from solar PV has the highest potential for growth, especially in Southern Europe. Wind turbines owned by prosumer collectives have a high potential in countries with enough available space around cities and towns and enough wind power density. The total electricity demand for households and residential buildings increases significantly in the two prosumer scenarios, due to the increased use of heat technologies that operate on electricity (mostly heat pumps) and electric vehicles, whereas heating and cooling demand stays fairly constant over time in the different scenarios.

The CEPROM model is an update of the model used in the 2016 study of CE Delft ‘The potential of energy citizens in the European Union’.  Compared to that study, heat technologies are added, data have been updated and several changes have been made to the modelling methodology and scope.