PNNL

Abstract

Today fossil energy dominates the energy consumption across the world. There has been an increasing momentum to reduce fossil energy consumption and increase renewable energy utilization to more than 70%. Such high penetrations of renewable resources with highly distributed nature bring large uncertainty and complexity that cannot be easily handled by the current infrastructure. For the last two decades, telecommunication industry has gone through a similar transition from centralized to distributed systems, and more recently to platform approaches, which become the corner stone of a vibrant platform economy. Based on lessons from the telecommunication industry, we propose a new concept called energy platform to address the renewable energy challenges. The energy platform is made of an array of computational algorithms, sensing and control technologies for key industry and energy users to jointly manage and control the complex energy infrastructure. It includes the following key components: (1) the hardware and software to generate, store, control and transmit electricity/data (the energy cloud), (2) the platforms and tools for key energy producers, digital, service and communication industry to share the assets and participate in and manage the complex infrastructure, and for customers to participate in energy transaction, (3) the service and business models for the platform economy. The energy platform also requires breakthroughs in many areas, including large scale energy storage, efficient power electronics, sensors and controls, new mathematical and computational tools, and deep integration of energy technologies and information sciences to control and stabilize such complex chaotic systems.