A sustainable and reliable energy supply constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for the future of our society. The change to renewable sources comes with several systemic changes and includes, among others, smaller and more distributed producers as well as stronger and less predictable fluctuations. Parallel developments such as the transition from conventional producers and consumers to prosumers and the increasing number of electric vehicles add further complications. These changes require to extend and upgrade currently existing power grids. Yet precisely how to achieve an effective, robustly operating (electric) energy system is far from being understood. This focus issue aims to contribute to a number of these upcoming challenges from the perspective of self-organization and the collective nonlinear dynamics of power grids, interacting economic factors as well as technical restrictions and opportunities for distributed systems.