Decentralized Energy, Centralized Data? Investigating the Role of Big Tech in Decentralized Energy Systems

Economy-wide electrification with a high share of renewables has emerged as the core pillar of the energy transition (IEA, 2025; Walter et al., 2025). However, modern renewable energy technologies pose key challenges to grids and require new ways of managing and organizing them to ensure proper functioning and stability. At the same time, access to these technologies is wide-spread thanks to falling prices of such modular technologies as solar panels and batteries. Thus, we have seen a rise in distributed energy sources across scales (from large-scale solar and wind farms to energy communities and residential rooftop solar) and increasing significance of prosumers and decentralized energy systems (Sareen et al., 2025a). Together with the opportunities afforded by digital technologies, additional innovations such as aggregation and virtual power plants are being adopted by both incumbents and new entrants. While much literature looks at the role of digitalization in decentralized energy systems and the various technologies involved (Ferdaus et al., 2024; Jaramillo et al., 2025; Radvile & Urbonas, 2025), less attention is given to the data underlying these technologies and systems and how it is managed, by whom, and who owns the data, though some literature does raise related questions (Boekelo & Kloppenburg, 2023; Sareen et al., 2025b). Even in Europe, American big tech companies (e.g., Amazon, Google, Microsoft) account for 70% of the cloud market (Goovaerts, 2025). Recent research has raised concerns regarding the potential for these actors to use their position to create intellectual monopolies and the potential impacts on the energy transition (Rikap & Weko, 2025; Weko, 2025). A question then emerges, do decentralized energy systems rely on centralized data infrastructures? This paper therefore investigates the data infrastructures underlying decentralized energy systems and the role of big tech therein. Actors of interest include energy communities, niche innovators such as aggregators or virtual power plants, as well as smaller incumbents like municipal energy companies. The results have implications not only for the governance of decentralized energy and issues of energy citizenship, justice and democracy but also for data management and related concerns around data sovereignty.