Consumatore e prosumerismo energetico nel quadro regolatorio europeo

To understand who the consumer is helps us to identify how prosumerism operates in the energy market. The prosumer constitutes the arrival point of the defense of the weaker party in markets, such as the banking and financial ones, where the Court of Justice’s case-law used the weapon of the “functional interpretation” to gradually enlarge the object of the protection. The main steps of this path are constituted by the category of «dual purpose contracts» and the application of consumer protection even where there is a professional activity provided that it is «marginal». The energy prosumer is at the hearth of the new European regulatory framework; he is a key player in the new decentralized energy market. The EU Directives 2001/2018 and 944/2019, in Italy respectively implemented by the Legislative Decree 199 and 210/2021, modulated the protection through a multi-level approach on the basis of the types of energy consumption (individual or collective) and energy production (energy communities) and level of vulnerability of each energy consumer.