Abstract
This paper systematically proposes a novel concept of energy Internet access equipment (AE) integrating cyber-physical systems (CPSs). First, based on the concept and characteristics of energy Internet AE, we comprehensively investigate its global system development, including overall framework and functions design, core hardware equipment development, and software system design and development. Among these, the hardware part containing five major types of equipment is used to achieve a unified connection of various distributed energy equipment; the software part, consisting of three categories of system platforms (i.e., local energy management system, cloud Web page system, and user-side APP), is applied to integrate energy management and distributed coordination control. Moreover, we carry out an initial practice for this proposed energy Internet AE. Based on this, finally, we prospect future application scenarios for the energy Internet AE from multiple aspects. As a unified interface platform, the proposed energy Internet AE is directly applied for end-users to connect various energy supply and utilization equipment to the energy Internet, so as to monitor and coordinate the distributed energy equipment in real time and, finally, to realize the bidirectional circulation of energy flow and information flow in smart grid. The biggest innovation of this paper lies in comprehensively proposing a novel concept of energy Internet AE from the perspective of the CPS, with an aim of hoping to provide some thoughts for end-users to access the energy Internet efficiently and conveniently through such equipment in the future.
I. INTRODUCTION
Electrical energy has been widely utilized in various aspects of our daily lives and production. With the rapid development of economy and society, more and more countries have gradually begun to pay attention to demand response (DR) and integrated energy management (IEM). Energy management and optimization play a key effect in the sustainable development [1]. To this end, the United States and some European countries first proposed the concept of home energy management system (EMS) in 1970s, with the goal of improving electricity consumption efficiency and achieving energy saving and emission reduction. Since then, relevant research results of EMS have become increasingly abundant [2]–[5]. Currently, IEM can solve the problems of distribution network power supply, user power consumption and new energy utilization to a certain extent. However, the actual IEM systems still have many shortcomings when used in actual energy management and utilization. In particular, the existing energy exploration and exploitation models that rely on non-renewable energy sources are increasingly difficult to sustain. Therefore, high-efficiency, safe, reliable and sustainable energy use models will be the solution to the major problem of energy use faced by human and society [6]
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we systematically propose a novel concept of energy internet AE based on the idea of CPS. The main contributions are summarized as follows:
1) This proposed energy internet AE is a multi-layer system platform used to achieve unified access of distributed energy equipment, which can interconnect energy flow and information flow, thereby achieving coordinated control and optimized utilization of end-user’s distributed energy equipment such as electrical appliances, PVs, fans, EV charging piles, and energy storage devices. This provides a technical solution for the plug-and-play of user equipment under the energy internet in the future, and also provides new insights for IEM and multiple trading modes in the market environment.
