New business models as drivers of distributed renewable energy systems

Distributed renewable energy systems have been proposed as the future of energy supply. However, many technological, governance, and societal obstacles must be eliminated before this vision becomes mainstream. This paper analyzes different business models which could contribute to this change by attracting new consumers to distributed energy schemes. Consumers interest is organized along 6 parameters and state-of-art technologies are compared against them to detect technological gaps which could delay or prevent a successful implementation of these systems. The chosen method is a comparative analysis of selected commercial offers in four continents which implement new technologies and show a real-life test of its advantages, shortcomings and potential future improvements