The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional Supplier-User Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers

Miron, Dumitru; Epurescu, Vlad; Budacia, Elisabeta Andreea Article The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional SupplierUser Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers Amfiteatru Economic Provided in Cooperation with: The Bucharest University of Economic Studies Suggested Citation: Miron, Dumitru; Epurescu, Vlad; Budacia, Elisabeta Andreea (2023) : The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional Supplier-User Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers, Amfiteatru Economic, ISSN 2247-9104, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Vol. 25, Iss. 63, pp. 397-412, https://doi.org/10.24818/EA/2023/63/397 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/281710 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Micro and Macroeconomic Impact of the EU Energy Policy AE Vol. 25 • No. 63 • May 2023 397 THE STRATEGIC REPOSITIONING OF THE EUROPEAN UNION CONSUMERS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ENERGY PARADIGM CHANGE. FROM THE TRADITIONAL SUPPLIER-USER RELATIONSHIP TO THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROSUMERS Dumitru Miron1, Vlad Epurescu2* and Elisabeta Andreea Budacia3 1)2)Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania 3)Romanian American University Bucharest, Romania Please cite this article as: Miron, D., Epurescu, V., Budacia A.E. 2023. The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional Supplier-User Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers. Amfiteatru Economic, 25(62), pp. 397-412 DOI: 10.24818/EA/2023/63/397 Article History: Received: 28 December 2022 Revised: 16 February 2023 Accepted: 20 March 2023 Abstract The entire contemporary societal landscape, including the business environment, faces a complex kaleidoscope of challenges, fuelled by a greater than ever level of turbulence manifesting itself on all levels. In the new circumstances, opportunities and threats follow and multiply, interfere, and require a proactive approach and placed in synergistic logic. We are witnessing the emergence of times in which the most frequently used term is resilience. At the level of the European Union, resilience can be attached to all strategic or tactical vectors, the most interesting areas of manifestation of the need for resilience being those related to digitisation and the energy sector. Starting from the hypothesis that most of the geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions are changing at a very high speed, the authors of this article proposed to emphasise aspects related to the rediscovery of the advantages of energy autonomy. Aggregating the production curves for dispatchable photovoltaic energy in 2021, at the national level, the authors also highlighted a production model for prosumers. In this context, using the Cobb-Douglas production function, an attempt was made to diagnose the conditions in which the consumer can have a versatile role and become, in turn, an energy producer, contributing to the climate agenda. Keywords: Prosumers, renewable energy, photovoltaic energy, prosumption, energy suppliers. JEL Classification: D11, D24, 030 * Corresponding author, Vlad Epurescu – e-mail: [email protected] This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2023 The Author(s). AE The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional Supplier-User Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers 398 Amfiteatru Economic Introduction The linear growth model (based on consumption of resources that generate waste as a result of productive processes and built on the consideration of inexhaustible and widely available natural resources), still dominant on a global scale, is increasingly criticised (Denona Bogovic and Grdic, 2020). The externalisations of this model have led to an ecological and climate crisis, the depletion of conventional non-renewable resources and puts under danger the biodiversity. Both at the level of European and national public strategies and policies, as well as at the level of the business plans of companies, respectively, the directions of action of the organisational structures of civil society, the referential strategic package is the European Ecological Pact, whose main thematic areas are: nature and biodiversity, economy circularity and quality of life, climate change mitigation and adaptation, clean energy. Taking into account these basic elements of a redefined European societal picture is vital both when substantiating the development model centred on cohesion and when establishing the contour lines of a new development model at the level of the European Union, the one focused on more competitiveness. Energy resilience is increasingly organically connected with the digital one, this binomial of the future being subsumed under all the programmes and projects initiated at European and national level (especially the Recovery Assistance for Cohesion and European Territories (REACT EU) and the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR). Within the economic recovery package of the European Union (Next Generation EU), the basic pillars are: Supporting the Member States in order to recover; Economic recovery and aid measures for private investment; Assimilation of lessons learnt from the crisis generated by the pandemic. For all these directions of action, the elements of the regulatory and institutional framework were outlined, important financial and relational resources were made available, and the process of configuring the partnership structures aimed at ensuring the achievement of the desired goals was started. As has been emphasised for a long time in the specialised literature (Kuhn, 1970), any paradigm shift means the simultaneous undertaking of three steps: the modification of the outline elements of the general societal picture, the adequacy of the regulatory and institutional framework, and the substantial transformation of the actors' behaviour participants in the economic and social game. The authors of this article proposed insisting more on transformations of an attitudinal and behavioural nature, with access to the stimulating factors and the generated effects. The techno-industrial paradigm shift that we have been assisting for several years has caused, for the first time since the end of the preindustrial period, the transformation of the household from a space eminently intended for consumption, to one in which consumption is intertwined with energy production. Thus, the advantages of the virtual economy have become more and more visible, and the digitisation of social interaction has become the model engine of co-existence at a sustainable societal level, in which vulnerability is reduced in relation to the various societal threats, be they of an economic, health, energy, technological nature or otherwise. In this context, access to uninterrupted flow of energy has turned into an essential priority, especially considering the package of turbulences that the international economy and, therefore, the European one has faced in the last decade. This accumulation of threats, which Micro and Macroeconomic Impact of the EU Energy Policy AE Vol. 25 • No. 63 • May 2023 399 can also be associated with numerous opportunities in terms of changing the development model, creates a favourable context for members of society to add to their energy consumption ability that of energy production. The technology on which the energy produced from renewable resources (solar, wind, etc.) is based, which allows the production of energy at the point of consumption, has opened the chapter of a new paradigm in the energy sector, that of the emergence of prosumers. 1. Literature review The concepts of prosumer and prosumption are not new. In the scientific literature, they can be found since the beginning of the 1980s, being anticipated by Alvin Toffler in the book The Third Wave. Some reflections on the role of prosumers in the economy can also be found in Philip Kotler’s work (1986), who believed that the prosumer would generate profound changes in fundamental market mechanisms, determining at least four large categories of benefits for consumers: large cost savings, minimal skills, little time and effort, high personal satisfaction. As the energy sector is conceptually and technologically redefined and this strategic reorientation is driven by the achievement of climate goals, the role of prosumers begins to become increasingly important. Prosumers could enable increasing the rate of energy electrification, democratising the energy sector, and reducing carbon emissions (Saleh, 2018). They can combine small, carbon-free energy production capacities with smart energy distribution and storage technologies such as solar photovoltaic panels, smart meters, electric cars, and storage batteries (Parag and Sovacool, 2016). Using this combination of equipment and technologies, the prosumers achieve two results. First, they optimise and manage their own energy consumption, making it easier for them to achieve cost reductions and use energy more efficiently (Morstyn et al., 2018). Second, they can produce and feed electricity into the grid, thus achieving the status of a power producer while reducing the load on the national grid (Borowski, 2020). More and more analysts are considering that the exponential growth of the prosumers in the energy sector, especially in the European Union, is not related to an imminent exhaustion of conventional resources. Several epistemological constructions, but also empirical research highlight the fact that the emergence of this new category of users took place in a period of abundance, in which the energy markets were unbalanced due to an oversupply and a low demand for energy, amid the sanitary measures imposed during the first wave of the pandemic. The correlations we identified during this research highlighted the fact that the number of prosumers started to increase during 2020 and 2021, at a time when power prices reached historic lows. Therefore, the exponential increase in power prices that emerged in 2021 was not the main motivation for these behavioural changes. The growing number of prosumers is facilitated by the substantial reduction, by 82%, of the production costs for renewable energy capacities (European Commission, 2021), by technological improvements and thanks to the subsidy mechanisms made available by the Member States to promote green energy in order to achieve the climate objectives. In this context, prosumers become an essential link in the architecture of energy security and in the AE The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional Supplier-User Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers 400 Amfiteatru Economic efforts of the EU’s climate agenda, while taking over a share of the labour costs that were originally borne by producers (Jakimowicz, 2022). 2. The role of prosumers in the context of the transition to the new paradigm of energy sustainability Starting with Stanley Jevons (1865), one of the main figures of the Marginalist School, and continuing with other theorists, including Donella H. Meadows (1972), William D. Nordhaus, Hendrik Houthakker, Robert Solow (1973) or M.A. Adelman (1986), a concern of economic thought has been, for decades in a row, to draw attention to the danger of exhausting conventional energy resources and the effects on economic activity. The identification of resources and technologies as varied as possible for the production and distribution of energy catalysed efforts toward the operationalisation of technological improvements and innovations that allowed the diversification of the energy mix. At the same time, the improvement of industrial applications has generated a vital need to access energy without interruptions, to ensure the continuity of productive activities, as well as societal activities in general. The energy landscape has repositioned itself over time, migrating from demand to supply and from a status defined by scarcity to one defined by abundance. This transformation has been driven by successes, particularly in the US, in unconventional oil shale hydrocarbon production, and as cross-border trade transactions have become more intense, diversified, and complex. In these redefined conditions of the general economic picture, it has become increasingly obvious that there is a robust correlation, from a statistical point of view and relevant, from an analytical point of view, between environmental degradation and the inefficient and intensive consumption of fossil resources. This fact was also highlighted in the 2015 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which formed the basis for the consensus of the Paris Agreement. In this context, climate policies have begun to play an increasingly important role in the process of economic activity planning, especially the one administered by decision-making bodies in the European Union. The assumption of increasingly ambitious objectives, one of their aims being to control climate change, has determined the orientation of innovations toward renewable energy production technologies and has allowed it to acquire a central position in the decarbonisation of the energy mix and consumption. In an era of abundant energy resources, part of the consumption began to decentralise and was included in a new development model, the one based on decentralisation or atomisation in terms of the generation and use of energy resources. These were the prerequisites that facilitated the advancement of prosumers toward the inner circle of the energy landscape, that is, those energy consumers who can ensure their own energy needs using renewable energy production technologies, inside or close to the place of consumption (Leal-Arcas, Lesniewska and Proedrou, 2018). Prosumers have gradually recognised their increasingly important role within the package of strategies and public policies operationalised within the European Union. They have become core vectors of mechanisms aimed at the emergence of a complex, low-carbon, inclusive, and equitable energy system in which citizens actively interact with the energy market (Horstink, Micro and Macroeconomic Impact of the EU Energy Policy AE Vol. 25 • No. 63 • May 2023 401 Wittmayer and Ng, 2021). For this reason, non-household consumers, small or medium-sized economic operators, institutions or public authorities were not included in this category, the central element being individuals who consume and produce value, either for selfconsumption or for consumption by others, and may receive direct or indirect incentives from the organisations involved in the exchange (Lang et al., 2021). On the same line of conceptual reasoning and practical action is the text of the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the promotion of renewable energy RED II (2018), but which does not use the term prosumer, but self-consumer. It can only be part of a renewable energy community if it has a production capacity of less than 10.3 kW and not more than 50 kW and does not involve water pumping systems. In Regulation 944 (European Parliament, 2019), additional elements were added regarding prosumers, stating that all customer groups, industrial, commercial, and households, should have access to electricity markets in order to market its flexibility and self-generated electricity. In the new energy paradigm, consumers could have the opportunity to change their positioning in the value chain of energy distribution from a relatively passive one to an offensive (proactive) one, thanks to the technological possibilities to produce energy in various forms, electrical, by means of photovoltaic panels, or heat, using solar panels and heat pumps. Also, electricity can be stored in the short term with the help of specially designed batteries or using the batteries of electric cars as storage capacities. The goal is not just to ensure one's own consumption, but to participate in energy markets by selling or sharing energy, either individually or collectively, as part of an energy community (Horstink, Wittmayer and Ng, 2021). The main novelty brought by the presence of prosumers is that, within the electricity production process, one no longer obstinately pursues the first order productive optimum (economy of scale effects) in large-scale production capacities held by utility companies, but can also opt for a second best operationalised through smaller energy producing facilities. The second innovation is that prosumers, benefiting from their own energy produced under certain seasonal and climatic conditions, can disconnect from low-voltage transmission networks, no longer depending on a distributor for energy supply. If they choose to stay connected to the grid, the third innovation that the prosumer brings is that the flow of energy becomes bidirectional, with prosumers able to redirect amounts of electricity into the grid via low-voltage links. Another novelty that the presence of prosumers brings to the fore is that the premises are created for new market relations, some of which contribute to the flexibility of energy production. Prosumers can provide a network balancing service for suppliers because they can benefit from the energy surplus produced by the prosumers. The additional power produced by the prosumers may be priced lower than the day - ahead marginal market price when the supplier needs to secure a larger amount of energy for its portfolio of customers that has not been contracted through bilateral contracts or the forward market. An aspect less studied in the scientific literature and which has been put on the back burner by the authorities is the option to promote a local market where prosumers can trade energy among themselves, within a peer-to-peer-type system. Also, another integration model of prosumers, this time of those living in apartments, is that since they can generate green energy from a location other than the point of consumption, they might redirect it to the grid and, through bilateral contracts with distributors, they shall AE The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional Supplier-User Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers 402 Amfiteatru Economic be supplied with green energy from the grid at the place of consumption. This can be done by prosumers as part of an energy community, as stated in Regulation 944 (European Parliament, 2019): Citizen energy communities are considered to be a category of cooperation of citizens or local actors that should be the object of recognition and protection under Union law. 3. Encouraging developments in the direction of prosumers position at the European level In the first two years of the pandemic, the EU has visibly increased its capacity to produce solar energy by about 35%, from ~130 GW to about ~160 GW, installing a solar energy capacity of 19.5 GW in 2020, and a capacity of 26.7 GW in 2021, according to Figure 1. The pace during this period was much higher than that recorded in the pre-pandemic period, and rooftops have been the place for most of the deployment of solar energy so far (European Commission, 2022). We are justified in clarifying this by the fact that photovoltaic panels installed on the roofs of buildings have the advantage of making use of a normally unusable space, reducing the pressure on the conversion of agricultural land to be used by photovoltaic energy production facilities. Figure no. 1. Annual solar energy production capacity (GW) installed at the level of the European Union in the period 2016-2021 Source: Data processed by authors using BloombergNEF The substantial increase in solar power production capacity has come amid the European Union's post-pandemic economic recovery plans, orientated toward sustainability and increasing the degree of resilience of energy security. Thus, green energy represents the solution to reduce carbon emissions from energy consumption. Consequently, in 2021, the European Commission proposed the amendment of the Renewable Energy Directive, advancing more ambitious objectives regarding the share of renewable energy in the energy mix, which implies an increase from 32% to 40%. In 2022, in the context of strengthening 20.8 23.4 25.6 28.9 34.6 40.9 38.8 40.5 43.9 50 57 66.6 27.9 29.6 32.6 39.9 46.7 58.5 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 Household consumers Commercial Utillitary Micro and Macroeconomic Impact of the EU Energy Policy AE Vol. 25 • No. 63 • May 2023 403 energy security, the European Parliament adopted the RePower EU plan in May. One of the targeted objectives is for EU member states to have a total capacity of 600 GW of solar energy in 2030 (European Parliament, 2022), with the aim of reducing the dependence on natural gas imported from Russian companies. The estimates made by experts from the European Commission show that, in this ideal scenario, natural gas imports would decrease, annually, by an amount of 9 billion cubic metres compared to the level of 2021. To achieve this objective, the annual growth rate in the newly installed solar energy capacity, in the period 2022-2030, should double compared to that recorded in 2021. Prosumers play an important role in this increase in the share of photovoltaic energy, but, as can be seen in Figure 2, the development of the prosumer sector was asymmetric at the European level. Figure no. 2. Annual solar energy production capacity (GW) installed by prosumers at the level of the European Union in the period 2018-2021 Source: Map processed by authors using BloombergNEF At the end of 2021, in the European Union, the installed solar energy capacity in the residential sector reached 40 GW. The most developed prosumer sector is that of Germany, which has an installed capacity of 13 GW, i.e., more than a third of the European capacity. Other countries where the prosumer sector experienced significant expansion are the Netherlands – 5.4 GW, Italy – 5.1 GW, Belgium – 4.8 GW, Poland – 3.7 GW, France – 1.73 GW, Austria – 1.7 GW, Spain – 0.9 GW, Sweden – 0.8 GW, Hungary – 0.7 GW, Denmark – 0.6 GW and Greece – 0.5 GW. The asymmetric way in which the appetite for solar energy has developed in the European Union, in a way, runs counter to the natural potential correlated with the energy demand. Eastern European and South-East European countries, such as Cyprus, Romania, Estonia, Greece, and Bulgaria, although they have significant Germany 13,818.37 Netherlands 5,407.98 Italy 5,164.53 Belgium 4,833.35 Poland 3,776.10 France 1,735.14 Austria 1,700.24 Spain 933.2150269 Sweden 802.9052734 Hungary 708.4545288 Denmark 617.8590698 Greece 491.2049866 Portugal 249.8430023 Czechia 202.723999 Finland 171.1499939 Slovenia 154.3880005 Bulgaria 66.5444031 Slovakia 65.6281128 Romania 21 Cyprus 20 Croatia 10 Estonia 0 Ireland 0 Lithuania 0 Luxembourg 0 Malta 0 AE The Strategic Repositioning of the European Union Consumers in the Context of the Energy Paradigm Change. From the Traditional Supplier-User Relationship to the Emergence of the Prosumers 404 Amfiteatru Economic potential for the development of photovoltaic energy capacities, have not been able to capitalise on it. Figure no. 3. The technical production potential of photovoltaic energy in 2050, relative to the total electricity demand in the EU Source: Europa.eu, 2021. Energy prosumers in Europe. Citizen participation in the energy transition, p.19. 4. The evolution of prosumers in Romania As far as Romania is concerned, the figures regarding the installed capacity of the solar energy by the prosumers vary. BloombergNEF estimated that, in the year 2021, nonhousehold prosumers in Romania installed a photovoltaic energy generation capacity of 30.5MW, while household consumers had an installed capacity of 21MW. Instead, the National Energy Authority, NARE mentions in the annual Report on Monitoring the Activity of Prosumers a total capacity of 85MW, without distinguishing between domestic and non-domestic consumers. The reason is that in the Energy and Natural Gas Law, prosumers are considered to be consumers, natural persons, legal entities, and public authorities that own electricity production units from renewable sources with an installed power of no more than 100 kW (ANRE, 2022). According to NARE data, at the end of 2021, there were 13596 prosumers in Romania, of which 13109 were natural persons and 492 legal persons. The counties in Romania with the highest installed photovoltaic energy power for the prosum are Ilfov – 13,921 kW, Bucharest – 5,658 kW, Timiș – 4,337 kW, Arad – 3,612 kW, and Harghita – 2,622 kW. Micro and Macroeconomic Impact of the EU Energy Policy AE Vol. 25 • No. 63 • May 2023 411 In a market context in which the price of electricity based on coal and natural gas increases exponentially because of the turbulence generated by the uncertainty of some sources of supply from imports and against the background of the increase in the taxation of CO2 emissions, both prosumers and distributors of energy reach the situation of having a common objective. Decentralised energy production can become a tool for energy autonomy for prosumers, while, for distribution companies, surplus electricity obtained from prosumers can be an additional source of income, as it facilitates their access to a low-cost energy source which can be traded to other consumers at a different market price. In addition, electricity purchased from prosumers helps distribution companies reduce their carbon footprint in Goal 3 and, since distributed energy is carbon-free, it can facilitate the decarbonisation of energy consumed by other users who want to meet their climate goals. Incentives offered by public administrations from funds where the money obtained from the taxation of inefficient and CO2 – emitting production capacities is accumulated, can contribute substantially to the reduction of the LCOE. In this way, the foundations are laid for a pole of electricity production without carbon emissions and at a lower price than the market price compared to that practised by the utility companies. They can have much higher marginal costs per unit of electricity produced compared to a prosumer, and this is reflected in the prices charged on DAM when the demand for additional electricity increases. 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