Prosumer aggregation policies, country experience and business models

The recent rise of distributed generation and self-consumption, together with the unbundling of the electricity supply chain, sprout the opportunity for innovative energy policies that increasingly place end-users as active agents of the system and democratize access to the energy markets. Such is the case of the emerging concepts of virtual metering, peer-to-peer energy trading, shared generation and local network charges, hereby grouped under the umbrella policy genre “Prosumer Aggregation Policies”. This paper sets out to describe the fundamental mechanisms within these concepts, to categorize them and their policy impacts, in order to guide regulators, decision-makers and the research community through the key steps and considerations involved in the design of Prosumer Aggregation Policies. Based on a comprehensive assessment of country experiences and a showcase of real business models and pilot projects, it is argued that prosumer aggregation policies significantly enhance prosumers’ drivers and improve the potential market of distributed generation and traditional self-consumption policies, ultimately providing policy access to all end-users regardless of possessing the appropriate site or resource conditions. They also address challenges for grid operators regarding grid integration and market integration of distributed generation, helping to minimize their impact in grid management.