Ten questions concerning decentralised energy systems governance

Abstract

Rapid electrification of energy use based on low-carbon energy sources is underway in sectors such as buildings, transport, and industry, with parallel digitalisation of energy system components aimed to facilitate the increasingly complicated challenge of balancing energy demand and supply. This evolving cross-sectoral nature of energy systems requires renewed consideration of governance and regulation across spatial scales due to increased decentralisation in the ontology of energy systems. This decentralisation entails complex spatiotemporal flows, both of energy itself through infrastructure, and of real-time information to balance energy supply and demand. We address ten questions about the governance of decentralised energy systems, to identify the quandaries that regulators and operators must resolve for mainstreaming decentralisation as a strategy towards low-carbon energy systems. Crucially, this implies understanding energy flexibility as a relevant concern down to building and block scale, and developing and deploying transition metrics for cross-sectoral coordination to enable sustainable energy use in decentralised systems. Insights draw primarily on arguably the highest digitalised and low-carbon energy systems worldwide, namely Norway. Many countries are encountering similar challenges that this overview can help pre-empt and resolve.