IMPROSUME - The Impact of Prosumers in a Smart Grid based Energy Market

This is a joint research project with partners from NCE Halden (Norway), Aarhus School of Business (Denmark) and others.

"Prosumer" is an emerging concept in the power market that applies to consumers of energy that can also be producers. In a SmartGrid a prosumer can be a new and active participant in balancing the electricity system. A prosumer can be characterized by distributed generation technologies, energy storing equipment, smart meters and equipment to monitor, control and operate. The SmartGrid creates the basis for intelligent integration of user-actions in securing a continuing high supply security while integrating more fluctuating renewable energy into the electricity supply system. An important requirement is acceptance and active adoption of the new possibility by the prosumer. This project focuses on prosumers and their role and influence on the future energy market, and the role's impact on established structures will be highlighted.

The University of St. Gallen is the leader of workpackge 2 (WP2), "Preferences for Prosumer Business Models".

Questions of how to develop the market are crucial for the prosumer concept. An aspect of paramount importance in this regard is that business models for prosumers meet stakeholder expectations. Thus, an investigation of stakeholder preferences for different prosumer business model configurations is of interest. As a first step WP2 intends to conceptualize prosumer business models on base of an in-depth literature and industry review. Within a second step WP2 intends to measure preferences of different stakeholders for those business models in order to derive implications for managerial business model design and supportive energy policy. The geographical focus is on Switzerland, but comparisons with other European countries (e.g. Norway and Denmark) could be incorporated as well. The work package as a whole builds on consistent body of theory (business models) and uses the same state-of-the-art methodology for data collection and analysis (interviews and online Adaptive Choice-based Conjoint experiments). However, WP2 is divided into several sub-projects, each of which will be subject of a report:

- conceptual prosumer business model configurations (April 2011)
- stakeholders business model preferences I (October 2011)
- stakeholders business model preferences II (April 2012)
- implications for energy policies (September 2012)

Within ERA-Net the Swiss contribution of this project is funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.