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Abstract

What are business opportunities and impediments for innovators in energy services? In the European Union, thousands of local energy initiatives emerge and many of them evolve into enterprises that pursue distributed energy systems called smart grid. They add value in energy consumption. The number of new enterprises on the energy markets increased by the annual average of 3600 firms along with average 23,000 additional jobs per year during the period 2008–2011. These newcomers grow mainly due to services in the renewable energy production, efficient solutions for the residential electricity and value-adding gas use in businesses. Price guarantees for renewable energy delivery to grid support these innovators. In addition to competition on the energy markets, these innovators must overcome impediments posed by energy taxation that supports large-scale energy consumers and subsidies for fossil fuel producers that are larger than subsidies for renewable energy. These policies obstruct energy efficiency and renewable energy. The distributed energy systems emerge despite annual €317 billion policy support of the vested, large-scale energy businesses.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 1 Number of companies in electric power, gas and steam supply
Table 2.a Final energy consumption in the European Union (EU) of 27 states, annual average during 1995–2011
Table 2.b Energy consumption, residential mid-scale, average prices and trend during 2005–2011
Table 2.c Energy consumption, business mid-size, average prices and trend during 2005–2011
Table 3.a Fuel prices and energy sales prices in EU countries 2004–2011
Table 3.b Fuel prices and energy sales prices in EU countries 2004–2011
Table 4 Price discounts and tax exemptions in relation to scale of energy consumption
Table 5 Total annual tax exemptions and costs
Table 6 Assumed scale distribution for calculating total tax exemptions and costs

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Krozer, Y. (2016). Energy Services for Smart Grid. In: Theory and Practices on Innovating for Sustainable Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18636-8_11

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