In industry, we have long recognized different forms of production: one-off production, batch production, series production, mass production, and process industry. Each form has its own logic. A carpenter making a single custom table for a client works very differently than a car factory producing millions of identical models.
This lens is surprisingly useful when we look at our energy supply. For decades, the energy system has been dominated by mass production and process industry: large coal, gas, or nuclear power plants producing electricity continuously and feeding it into the grid. Continuity and scale were the guiding principles.
The Shift: From Centralized to Distributed Energy
The energy transition is fundamentally changing this picture. Where once a few large producers controlled everything, today we see a growing diversity of “production forms.”
Here’s how the analogy looks when we apply it to energy:
| Industry | Energy |
| One-off production | Household with solar panels and a home battery |
| Batch production | Neighborhood initiative with a shared roof or community battery |
| Series production | Wind farms and solar parks rolled out with standard designs |
| Mass production | Large coal, gas, or nuclear power plants |
| Process industry | Continuous sources like hydropower plants or district heating systems |
This means the energy system is becoming far more distributed, modular, and dynamic. Just like in manufacturing, such a shift requires new ways of planning, logistics, and control.
The Hard Condition: Electricity Must Always Flow
There is, however, one crucial difference between industrial production and energy supply. A car factory can shut down for a week if demand is low, but electricity must always be available. The lights cannot go out.
This creates strict conditions:
- Balancing: the sum of all small and large producers must at every moment equal the demand.
- Storage: batteries, hydrogen, and district heating become indispensable to smooth fluctuations.
- Smart control: digital platforms and market mechanisms must match supply and demand in real time.
Reliability Through Many Small Players
A common misconception is that reliability can only be guaranteed by keeping a few big power plants running. In reality, a large network of many smaller producers and storage units can be just as reliable—if not more so:
- Resilience through numbers: if one household or battery fails, the system barely notices. If a large central power plant fails, the impact is immediate and severe.
- Market signals as steering mechanism: when electricity prices reflect supply and demand in real time, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and even electric vehicles can respond collectively as if they were one giant power plant.
- Equal market access is crucial: today’s energy markets are mainly designed for large players. To make the system truly resilient, governments and regulators must ensure that households, cooperatives, and small businesses can also participate easily.
What This Means for Citizens
For ordinary people, all this technical talk boils down to a simple truth: the more households and businesses take part with their solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, the stronger and more reliable our energy system becomes.
The technology already exists. What is missing is a market and regulatory framework that gives small players the same opportunities as big ones.
Conclusion: The New Mix
The energy sector is moving away from the uniform model of mass production and evolving into a colorful mix of one-off, batch, and series production, combined with continuous sources. But the hard condition remains: electricity must always be delivered.
The real challenge of the energy transition is therefore twofold:
- Combine the flexibility and resilience of a distributed system with
- The reliability of the old centralized mass production model.
And here lies the role of policy: only by opening the market to many players and ensuring fair access can we create an energy system that is both sustainable and secure.
