3 The prosumer concept in energy
Whereas the prosumer term has been circulating in futurist literature and sociology since the 1970s, the adoption of the word in an energy context is much more recent. The earliest trace we could find of this usage was in a paper from 2009 by Timmerman and Huitema, who describe the inclusion of prosumers in the design of energy-management services.(1) Wim Timmerman and George Huitema, ‘Design of energy-management services -supporting the role of the prosumer in the energy market’ (CAiSE-DC’09 doctoral consortium, Amsterdam, 2009). They define prosumers as being ‘energy-producing consumers’. It is immediately clear that, contrary to its rather theoretical use in sociology, the prosumer in an energy context denotes a specific type of participant in the energy system.
The concept of prosumption in an energy context goes back thousands of years and historically, most people or households provided their own energy. Even when energy began to be used in a systematic way, such as through watermills and windmills, the converted energy was usually used to power one specific machine, for example a flourmill or a spinning machine. In this way, the production and consumption of usable energy remained part of the same enterprise. Vertically integrated energy monopolies only began to arise at the beginning of the 20th century, when highly capital-intensive fossil fuels began to take an increasingly important place in the energy system and the specific nature of electricity led to a centralization of generation.(2) Jeremy Rifkin, The zero-marginal cost society (Palgrave McMillan 2014) 47. It was only at that point in time that the roles of producer and consumer were clearly split.
We are currently witnessing a return to a distributed energy system. However, the start of this development also precedes the introduction of the word ‘prosumer’. The strength of the economic argument for centralized generation had already begun to wane in the 1960s, as the development of decentralized technologies reduced the importance of economies of scale in electricity generation. Technologies that are inherently prone to decentralization, such as solar power, were developed as early as the 1950s. Mention of local micro-generation, which is in essence a form of prosumer activity, goes back to the late 1980s.
It is clear that the relatively recent word ‘prosumer’ is only a label for a concept that is significantly older. Today’s evolution towards greater decentralization and increased prosumer participation is not a new phenomenon, but harks back to the classic way of energy provisioning. However, the circumstances in which prosumption takes place today are radically different, because the electricity grid offers a fully functioning alternative to prosumption, thereby changing prosumption from a need to a choice.