Enabling Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) towards an emerging smart energy system

The increasing penetration of renewable energy on the transmission and distribution power network is driving the adoption of two-way power flow control, data and communications needed to meet the dependency of balancing generation and load. Thus, creating an environment where power and information flow seamlessly in real time to enable reliable and economically viable energy delivery, the advent of Internet of Energy (IoE) as well as the rising of Internet of Things (IoT) based smart systems. The evolution of IT to IoT has shown that an information network can be connected in an autonomous way via routers from operating system (OS) based computers and devices to build a highly intelligent eco-system. Conceptually, we are applying the same methodology to the IoE concept so that Energy Operating System (EOS) based assets and devices can be developed into a distributed energy network via energy gateway and self-organized into a smart energy eco-system. This paper introduces a laboratory based IIoT driven software and controls platform developed on the NICE Nano-grid as part of a NICE smart system Initiative for Shenhua group. The goal of this effort is to develop an open architecture based Industrial Smart Energy Consortium (ISEC) to attract industrial partners, academic universities, module supplies, equipment vendors and related stakeholder to explore and contribute into a test-bed centric open laboratory template and platform for next generation energy-oriented smart industry applications. In the meanwhile, ISEC will play an important role to drive interoperability standards for the mining industry so that the era of un-manned underground mining operation can become the reality as well as increasing safety regulation enforcement.