DECENT: An Ontology for Decentralized Governance in the Renewable Energy Sector

The energy sector is a complex ecosystem in which many actors participate. In the EU, the energy sector is changing significantly as part of the energy transition. One important change is decentralization of energy, for example the bilateral trade of energy between households generating energy by solar panels and consuming energy. A key question is how to design the decentralized governance structure of such an ecosystem. We propose the DECENT (decentralized) ontology, which results from an extensive literature study in the field of decentralized governance in the energy sector, which allows to describe governance in ecosystems in a structured way. Its intended user-base are business developers and ecosystem designers. The DECENT ontology provides the terminology to represent and analyze important governance constructs for these stakeholders. We demonstrate the practical use of the ontology by means of a case study about peer-to-peer energy trading.