The Emerging Energy Internet: Architecture, Benefits, Challenges, and Future Prospects

Abstract

Energy Internet is a concept proposed to harness, control, and manage energy resources effectively, with the help of information and communication technology. It improves a reliability of the system, and provides an increased utilization of energy resources by integrating the smart grid with the Internet. A scalable and reliable information and communication architecture is a crucial factor for both the operation and management of the energy Internet. The routing or managing of electrical energy is performed through an energy router (ER), synonymous with a communication router, which routes data packets instead of energy packets. In this paper, a holistic review of the energy Internet evolution in terms of the architecture, types of ERs, and the benefits and challenges of its implementation is presented. An exhaustive summary of the designs and architectures of the different types of ERs is also presented in this paper. The benefits of the energy Internet, along with the challenges of its implementation on a large-scale distributed architecture with the inclusion of renewable energy resources, is discussed. Finally, future prospects for the energy Internet for achieving guaranteed reliability and security is presented.