Power to the People

The energy challenges facing the EU are well known: climate change; rising consumption and dependence on external sources of energy; volatility of prices around a general upward trend; constraints on the development of production and transportation infrastructure; lack of reliability of exporting countries; etc. When facing a big problem, policy makers are tempted to seek a big solution. This is particularly true of the energy sector, where, for historical and economic reasons, the tendency has been to promote large-scale, centralised systems. This report shows that there may in fact be many advantages to looking smaller. It does so by examining the merits for the EU of promoting “decentralised, clean or green electricity generation systems owned by communities or individuals that have the potential to generate excess energy to sell back to the distribution network of the electricity grid”. This approach is original in several respects.