Energy Internet
Discussion
"History's great economic revolutions occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. Energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the new complex commercial activities. In the 18th and 19th centuries, cheap print technology and the introduction of state schools gave rise to a print-literate workforce with the skills to manage the increased commercial activity made possible by coal and steam power, ushering in the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, centralised electricity communication -- the telephone, radio and television -- became the medium to manage a more complex and dispersed oil, auto and suburban era, and the mass consumer culture of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Today, internet technology and renewable energies are about to merge to create a powerful infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR). In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own green energy and share it in an "energy internet", just as we now generate and share information online. The creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via an energy internet and connected to plug-in zero-emission transport, establishes a five-pillar infrastructure that will spawn thousands of businesses and millions of sustainable jobs. The democratisation of energy will also bring with it a reordering of human relationships, impacting the way we conduct business, govern society, educate our children and engage in civic life.
The TIR will lay the foundations for a collaborative age. Its completion will signal the end of a 200-year commercial saga characterised by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial markets and mass workforces, and the beginning of a new era marked by collaborative behaviour, social networks and boutique professional and technical workforces. In the coming half-century, conventional, centralised business operations will be increasingly subsumed by the distributed business practices of the TIR; and the traditional, hierarchical organisation of power will give way to lateral power organised nodally across society.
At first glance, lateral power seems a contradiction. Power, after all, has traditionally been organised pyramidically. Today, however, the collaborative power unleashed by internet technology and renewable energies restructures human relationships, from top to bottom to side to side, with profound consequences. The music companies didn't understand distributed power until millions of people began sharing music online, and corporate revenues tumbled in less than a decade. Encyclopedia Britannica did not appreciate the collaborative power that made Wikipedia the leading reference source in the world. Newspapers didn't take the blogosphere seriously; now many titles are either going out of business or moving online. The implications of people sharing energy are even more far-reaching.
To appreciate how economically disruptive the TIR is, consider the changes over the past 20 years. The democratisation of information and communication has altered the nature of global commerce and social relations as significantly as the print revolution. Now, imagine the impact that the democratisation of energy across all of society is likely to have when managed by internet technology."
(http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/02/ideas-bank/energy-sharing)
More information
* Research Project: Building the Energy Internet as a large-scale IoT-based cyber-physical system that manages the energy inventory of distribution grids as discretized packets via machine-type communications (EnergyNet). Cyber-physical systems group - LUT University. Pedro Henrique Juliano Nardelli, Arun Narayanan et al. Funded by Academy of Finland.
URL = https://sites.google.com/view/energy-internet
"The recent development of information and energy technologies has the potential to advance the emergence of groups of non-industrial users that are self-sufficient in their energy needs while fully supplied by renewable sources. This project focuses on the Energy Internet as a large-scale cyber-physical system that virtualizes electric energy in packets to manage supply and demand in distribution grids, considering the existence of batteries and flexible consumption. Packetized energy has been already deployed to control individually specific loads as electric vehicle charging and water boilers via packet requests to an energy server. These requests may be granted, scheduled or not granted depending on the management algorithm. Although already proved in smaller scales, the concept of packetized energy was not designed to allow scaling-up to become a dominant technology. A management algorithm shall be then developed to handle the combinatorial allocation problem related to the server’s decisions while satisfying both the physical grid operational needs and the users’ service requirements. This project is concerned with technological and regulatory issues that would allow the Energy Internet to emerge, sustainably grow and then become the dominant way to manage the distribution grid. In the technological realm, this project will develop the energy management algorithm and investigate the how wireless communication systems shall be deployed to guarantee the diverse requirements imposed by the grid applications. The focus is on machine-type communications following the current research in 5G technologies, mainly massive connectivity, low latency and ultra-reliability. Using the communication-enabled grid facilities available at LUT Green Campus, this project will study the most efficient communication deployments, from data acquisition to end-application, based on traffic modeling, short message communication, new modulations, random-access schemes and statistical signal reconstruction. In relation to regulation, the research will test how different governance models may affect the layout and deployment of the management algorithm, and how different algorithms can co-exist so that the power quality and security of supply are ensured. Agent-based models will be used to study the feasibility and the conditions that would allow for a smooth transition from the existing today’s electricity market to the fossil-fuel-free Energy Internet by 2050."