“In the upcoming era, we will need to create an energy internet that will allow millions of people to produce green renewable energy in their homes, offices and factories. The excess energy can be shared with others, just as we are now It's the same as sharing information on the Internet." This is Jeremy, chairman of the Washington, DC, Economic Trends Foundation. Rifkin thinks about the future in his book The Third Industrial Revolution.

Industry is a major resource and energy consumption. China's energy consumption in 2014 was 4.26 billion tons of standard coal, of which about 70% was used for industrial consumption. "After the Internet industry has accounted for more than 20% of GDP, the direct and incidental industry value it brings will exceed 20 trillion yuan in the next 10 years," said Liu Dongxiang, executive vice chairman of the China Smart Energy Industry Technology Innovation Alliance. China Electronics News reporter said.

Recently, the “National Smart Energy Public Service Cloud Platform” was officially launched and opened for testing. In the context of “Internet+”, the platform was interpreted by the industry as a footnote for “Internet+Energy”. According to the schedule of the National Energy Administration, the National Energy Internet Action Plan will be introduced during the year, which will make the capital market and the media excited again.

The “State-Owned Manufacturing 2025” released by the State Council pointed out that the green manufacturing will be fully promoted, and the Implementation Plan of the 2015 Industrial Green Development Special Initiative issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also pointed out that the enterprise energy management informatization level should be upgraded, and the intelligent application of energy management is also the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology “2015 One of the key actions in the implementation plan of the special pilot action demonstration project for smart manufacturing. It can be said that with the help of “Internet+”, the intelligent management of energy in industrial enterprises has reached the fast lane.

Energy information flow can flow on the Internet

The Internet of energy is essentially a kind of industrial Internet. It is essentially an Internet of Things. Through an interview, the reporter learned that the energy Internet, through the application of the Internet and modern communication technologies, enables real-time monitoring and analysis of energy production, use, dispatch, and efficiency, and real-time monitoring and reporting on the basis of big data and cloud computing. Optimize the treatment to achieve the best energy management of the enterprise.

For example, factory intelligent lighting can monitor the LED lights of the factory through the Internet of Things technology. When its light decay gradually reaches more than 30%, the system will remind the control personnel to replace it so as to achieve energy saving and consumption reduction.

For industrial enterprises, air conditioners, lighting, and machinery and equipment are large consumers of energy. Using energy Internet technologies, various energy consumption data such as electricity, water, and gas are collected by industrial sensors and stored in data centers through industrial communication gateways. The monitoring platform and management and control center can realize visual monitoring and automatic control of equipment energy consumption, and through data analysis and mining, help enterprises finally form energy-saving decision-making recommendations, formulate energy-saving strategies and improve energy management.

“In the energy-intensive industries such as steel and telecommunications, the collection of energy data is particularly important. Through scientific analysis and effective management of energy information, we can effectively reduce costs, increase production efficiency, and achieve energy conservation and environmental protection goals.” said Liu Dong. "Once energy is transformed into visual information flow on the Internet, then the waste will no longer exist. The factory's production efficiency, internal operations and management efficiency of the company will therefore be greatly enhanced."

Large enterprises can build private energy Internet systems and energy management platforms, but due to cost reasons, SMEs need to use cloud computing to obtain third-party services. The National Smart Energy Public Service Cloud Platform is an intelligent energy management platform. Through organizing public resources, it provides enterprises with third-party public services such as data storage, real-time monitoring, visual management, data analysis, risk control, and energy efficiency analysis.

The first task is to break the island of information

The new production factor of “Internet+” is big data. In the age of the Internet of Everything, the flow and use of data is rapidly accelerating. Big data has become a node for the integration and application of new generation information technology and traditional industries. However, for the energy internet, data collection is easy, and data transmission and collection are not so simple.

Shen Wei, senior business development manager of Intel (China) Co., Ltd., told the China Electronics News that, for enterprises, traditional energy management was driven by the project system alone, resulting in the existence of several independent energy management systems, such as water One set of electricity, one set of electricity, one set of boilers, and one set of central air conditioners. The data of individual systems can be collected by sensors. However, since the data transmission protocol of each energy system is not uniform, the data collected by them cannot be shared. Not on the big data analysis and mining, and data sharing and mining is precisely the essence of the energy Internet. Therefore, for enterprises, the primary task of building energy internet is to break the island of information.

The situation that such an island of information needs to be broken down is prevalent in the entire energy internet industry and has become a resistance to the development of the energy internet. Liu Dong, executive vice chairman of China’s Smart Energy Industry Technology Innovation Alliance, also stated that “Internet+energy” or the Internet of Energy is now in full swing, but it is limited by the lack of uniform standards, resulting in a variety of transmission protocols and data formats. With issues such as unification, new technologies on the Internet cannot be applied on a large scale.

However, the reporter learned that this situation has changed at the beginning of this year.

According to the official website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, on March 2, 2015, the ISO/IEC official release document, China's leading IEEE 1888 energy Internet standard passed the final round of ISO/IEC voting, becoming the first ISO/IEC of the global energy internet industry. International standards. Through the ISO/IEC/IEEE 18880 standard, data such as electricity, water, and gas can be digitized, and new Internet technologies such as big data and cloud computing can be applied to improve energy efficiency, energy conservation, emission reduction, and other functions, and include terminal products and converged products. , multi-protocol gateway products, storage systems, intelligent analysis platform, visual interface, authentication and security systems, network management and billing systems, system integration, certification and testing, and contract energy management service industry chain.

In other words, with the ISO/IEC/IEEE 18880 standard, hundreds of millions of devices and machines in the energy production end, energy transmission end, and energy consumption end can be connected to form the "Internet of Everything Foundation" of the energy Internet, and information islands. It was also broken.

Of course, once the data is collected and aggregated into the back-end big data analysis, it is necessary to focus on decision support rather than merely statistical analysis. "To reflect the value of the Internet for energy, back-end big data analytics need to focus on decision support to help companies optimize their energy management and use, not just knowing how much electricity the company uses, and how much electricity it uses. Feng Weimin, senior technical director of Shanghai Baosight Software Co., Ltd. said.

Existing network architecture needs to be changed

The reporter learned that the current national smart energy public service cloud platform has been signed with 14 provinces and cities to build a local smart energy platform. At the same time, it has launched industry sub-platforms for oil, communications, steel and other industries, and has built a nationwide, multi-industry energy internet. data center.

It can be imagined that once the industrial enterprise users begin to use the energy internet and become one end of the energy internet, the nationwide energy internet construction will also come into being. This will collect energy consumption data at the national level, forecast energy demand and energy efficiency. The optimization of management, even the policy formulation of industrial energy-saving and emission-reduction and the construction of a green manufacturing system all have a huge boost.

However, when the Internet of energy grows bigger and bigger, problems arose. Academician Liu Yunjie, member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the China Unicom Science and Technology Commission, stated at the “2015 Global Future Network and SDN Technology Conference” held recently: “Industrial Internet has also raised the reliability, real-time and service challenges for the current Internet. For the moment, the network architecture needs to be changed."

He believes that due to inherent flaws in the Internet, including inflexible architecture, unacceptable traffic explosion, and low security, a fundamental structural change is required when the Internet and the real economy are merged.

Lu Fangming, a professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told reporters that for the Internet of energy, the number of terminals will show explosive growth in the future. This requires that the network be managed and controlled, requiring more flexible network management. This provides SDN (Software Defined Network) technology. Use of land.

According to reports, the SDN gene is "numerical separation", and this is precisely to ensure that the energy Internet can achieve flexible and controllable after the terminal's explosive growth. SDN technology can separate data and control signals, so that the network is divided into two levels from the original level, namely the data layer and the control layer. The control signals were originally handled by routers. The routers of each node need to process data as well as control and management information. What SDN does is to separate the control right on the network device and manage it by a centralized controller without relying on the underlying network devices (routers, switches, firewalls), and shielding the differences from the underlying network devices. The control rights are completely open. Users can customize any network routing and transmission rule policies that they want to implement, which makes them more flexible and intelligent.

In addition, the energy internet involves a wide range of new services such as energy-saving services and carbon trading. SDN can realize the virtualization of network node devices to meet the different needs of emerging services and accelerate business innovation. SDN can enable the network to dynamically select and share. This sharing mechanism can also ensure the interoperability of information and two-way flow of the energy Internet.