More and more households generate sustainable energy with solar panels and become more conscious of their energy consumption. In the Netherlands, the current regulation is that people can feed-in their excess power to the electricity grid. Net metering allows the fed-in energy to be off-set to consumption at another time. It is expected that from 2023 this regulation will slowly disappear. Next to that, smart systems are expected to ensure maximum energy usage at the time of generation. The main driver for such systems is the prevention of overloading the electricity grid and preventing costs for strengthening the grid.

More and more people look for alternatives to share energy on a smaller scale. They are sometimes driven by ideology to use locally produced energy directly in the vicinity, sometimes by social motives, preferring to share their electricity with neighbours rather than an electricity company.

The changes in the energy market impact the players and the rules of the game. The Club van Wageningen is concerned about how the energy system will develop and strives to influence the developments such that the new systems are fair, inclusive and democratic. LightHouse has been part of the Club since its first strategic gathering and fully shares the concern. In this project, we research how a system for energy sharing can become 'Club van Wageningen'-proof. We focus on the technical aspects: how the system architecture and data platform should be designed to provide a fair, inclusive, and democratic solution. We use the case EnergyMatch Helmond to develop design guidelines for implementation.

The Dutch version of the report is available for download.

  EnergyMatch