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The comprehensive retrofit of residential buildings has significant potential to reduce carbon emissions and provide additional heath and economic benefits. However, in countries such as the UK, much of this potential is yet to be realised. This paper shows how the concept of ‘business models’ (BMs) can be a powerful tool for understanding the challenge of improving energy performance and reducing carbon emissions in residential buildings. Through a review of contemporary literature and 18 semi-structured interviews, the paper describes and compares five distinct BM archetypes: the atomised market model, market intermediation model, one-stop-shop, energy services agreement and managed energy services agreement. These models range from the traditional approach to highly innovative energy service contracts. The paper further illustrates how the UK and EU market for retrofitting residential buildings is beginning to trial the more innovative BMs. These emerging BMs are characterised by increasingly industrialised processes and integrated supply chains, a holistic customer offering and single point of sale, long-term energy-saving performance contracts (ESPC) and integral project finance. It is argued that whilst the traditional BM is suitable for the implementation of single or piecemeal energy-saving measures, BM innovation will be required to meet the UK’s ambitious climate change targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key strategy in the European Union's ambition to establish an 'Energy Union' that is not just clean, but also fair, consists of empowering citizens to actively interact with the energy market as self-consumers or prosumers. Although renewable energy sources (RES) prosumerism has been growing for at least a decade, two new EU directives are intended to legitimise and facilitate its expansion. However, little is known about the full range of prosumers against which to measure policy effectiveness. We carried out a documentary study and an online survey in nine EU countries to shed light on the demographics, use of technology, organisation, financing, and motivation as well as perceived hindering and facilitating factors for collective prosumers. We identified several internal and external obstacles to the successful mainstreaming of RES prosumerism, among them a mismatch of policies with the needs of different RES prosumer types, potential organisational weaknesses as well as slow progress in essential reforms such as decentralising energy infrastructures. Our baseline results offer recommendations for the transposition of EU directives into national legislations and suggest avenues for future research in the fields of social, governance, policy, technology, and business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]