When Distributed Energy Becomes Governable: A Perspective on Coordination and Aggregation in Energy Transitions

The energy transition requires not only the deployment of low-carbon technologies, but also the organization of dispersed resources into forms of coordination that are operationally effective, institutionally legitimate, and socially durable. The existing transition frameworks explain institutions, niches, and system formation well, yet they are less explicit about how coordination intensifies across physical, digital, and social domains, why technically capable arrangements may remain socially fragile, and how aggregation redistributes authority and visibility. Building on Xue et al.’s Cyber–Physical–Social Systems in Energy (CPSSE) framework, this Perspective develops an interpretive elaboration of CPSSE to address that gap. Its main contribution is a shared analytical vocabulary that links uncertainty, staged coordination, and aggregation, and that recasts virtual power plants as socio-technical accomplishments rather than merely control architectures. Rather than proposing a measurement model, this article uses concepts drawn from information, coordination, and aggregation to examine what conditions render distributed energy governable, whose participation is stabilized or marginalized, and how legitimacy, accountability, and user acceptance become constitutive conditions of coordination. The Perspective contributes to energy social science by clarifying how cyber–physical capability interacts with governance conditions, participation, and institutional durability, while identifying an empirical agenda for studying how coordination is negotiated, stabilized, contested, and unevenly distributed across distributed energy systems.