A European research team has investigated how residential prosumers acted in difficult regulatory environments in countries of the so-called Visegrad Group (V4) – the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – and has found that one of the main drivers leading to PV adoption was a sort of self-defense behavior.
To describe this particular set of bottom-up social actions, the scientists coined the concept of “energy self-defense.”
“This behavior aims at alleviating the tensions, fears, and insecurities caused by deficiencies in the official energy system and the shortcomings of state energy policy,” the research's lead author, Piotr Zuk, told pv magazine. “It may well become more prominent soon.”
Zuk explained that, with higher energy prices, the public anxiety over limited access to electricity and heating in the winter months increases. “We are likely to witness various grassroots initiatives in which people begin to take energy matters into their own hands,” he stated. “This could signal the emergence of a bottom-up process of energy system decentralization, challenging both the state’s monopoly on energy policy and the dominant role of large energy corporations as suppliers.”
“When social policy begins to collapse and governments are more focused on military expenditure than on strengthening public services, segments of society often look for ways to bypass these systemic shortcomings,” he added. “In doing so, they address their own needs and, in the process, create alternative social frameworks—in this case, a form of independent energy civil society.”
In the study “Energy self-defence against official policy: prosumer motives and tactics in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia,” published in Energy Research & Social Science, Zuk and his colleagues explained that “energy self-defense” materialized in Europe after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, which was followed by rising energy prices, unpredictable energy policies and a considerable increase in residential PV capacity and heat pumps in the four countries considered for their work.
They also noted, however, that this growth was not driven by new regulatory frameworks and special agreements between prosumers and power utilities in the V4 countries. Their set of behaviors was rather described as a replica, under different socio-historical conditions, of the “Gramsci-style” civil society movements that materialized in these countries in the 1970s and 1980s to protest against their respective authoritarian communist regimes.
“In Eastern European countries, where a low level of general trust is constantly observed, faith in official energy price forecasts and energy policy after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine has completely collapsed,” the study reads. “Paradoxically, the high level of distrust towards the official order and the real and potential negative consequences of the actions taken by official institutions can stimulate grassroots social activities.”
A series of interviews conducted with Eastern European prosumers confirmed that, by resorting to residential PV in the past two years, they substantially reacted to the price shock produced by the war in Ukraine. These independent efforts, however, could not be enough to ensure continuity to the energy transition, as prosumers always need clear regulatory frameworks such as feed-in tariffs, net metering or net billing to calculate investment return.
“In all V4 countries, economic factors were crucial for prosumers deciding to install a PV system,” the academics emphasized, noting that environmental concerns were not of major importance, which confirms the results of other research conducted on this topic.
As an antidote to weak regulatory conditions for PV and clean energies, the research group recommends strengthening the transmission networks and increasing the level of active citizenship, explaining that, through these two actions, the lack of trust in the state could easily turn into increased trust in fellow citizens.
“Without this shift, there is no space for the development of grassroots initiatives grounded in the principles of cooperation and mutual aid, unity in diversity, and solidarity-based action beyond the official structures of the state and its energy regimes – this capacity is particularly vital in times of ecological, energy, and social crises,” they concluded.
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