A systematic review towards integrative energy management of smart grids and urban energy systems

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic review to align current and future research in smart grids (SG) and smart urban energy systems (SUES) and unify the diverse but fragmented research in urban energy management. First, the common research themes repeatedly appearing in the SG and SUES literature are categorized into logical physical, cyber, and social energy processes. Critical findings are summarized for each part, i.e., the advances and trends in physical energy generation, transmission, consumption, and storage processes of cities for energy interventions, the cyber process chain of energy sensing, modeling, forecasting, scheduling, coordinating, and adapting for enhancing the “smartness” of power and urban energy systems, and the social energy processes of understanding, protecting, engaging, and governing human to be a new smartness dimension. Second, the process-based framework provides insights on the design and implementation of SG and SUES for engineers, planners, and policymakers, such as optimizing the system performance by upgrading individual processes and exploring new links among identified physical, cyber, and social energy processes. The upscaling barriers and strategies of sustainable energy technologies in the development and deployment stages are also summarized to scale up sustainable energy processes to a higher level. Finally, future research directions are envisioned, including developing data markets, privacy-preserving data sharing and analytics for urban-scale energy modeling, refining policy and standards for safety, privacy, cybersecurity, and interoperability issues, assessing technology maturity and energy system success factors, and removing regulatory and structural barriers.