March 2022

Written by Haoyong Chen, Guest Editor

This special issue of the IEEE Smart Cities eNewsletter focuses on the development of smart, low-carbon and efficient urban energy systems, that support the realization of the carbon neutrality target. These urban energy systems are centered on electricity and coupled with various other energy sources such as wind, thermal, oil and gas. The comprehensive utilization of multiple energy sources is becoming an important means to improve power generation efficiency, accommodate renewable energy systems, and reduce carbon emissions. The integration of high share of intermittent renewable energy generation systems, a large number of distributed resources, multiple energy networks and the wide participation of stakeholders across a smart city have brought challenges to the planning and operation of urban energy systems.

Written by Yongjun Zhang, Kanghua Zhong, Qinhao Li, and Yuzheng An

Ubiquitous Internet of Things in Electricity (IoTE) is emerging as a key technology for energy intelligent management in the construction of a smart city framework. It provides strong support for distributed consumption of new energy, multi-level energy interaction, and intelligent consumption of multi-energy for various entities within a smart city. The cloud-edge collaboration model, which is characterized by a weak centralized distribution, further integrates modern intelligent algorithms such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data mining to optimize the overall architecture through the reasonable allocation of cloud and edge task plans in the IoTE. The cloud-edge two-layer fusion model theory provides feasible research schemes in theoretical research and guides the future direction of IoTE construction in smart city development.

Written by Guixiong He, Kaicheng Liu, Huaguang Yan, and Haoyong Chen

Under the background of China's four revolutions in energy consumption, supply, technology, and system, the form of energy system presents a new development trend. The state puts forward "guiding social forces to build a multi-energy collaborative and terminal integrated comprehensive energy service model." The energy demand of end users has changed from "power consumption" to "energy consumption", and the energy supply status options have changed from "yes or no" to "good or bad". There is an urgent need for more professional, intensive, and integrated high-quality, low-cost, and high-quality energy services. In urban load gathering areas, building distributed energy stations, coordinating the production, storage, transmission, and distribution of energy, making full use of load differences and energy complementarity, and providing integrated power supply, hot and cold energy supply has become a new idea for the comprehensive utilization of distributed energy. Compared with the traditional energy supply mode, the interconnected comprehensive energy system has better source load matching, multi-energy complementarity, better energy efficiency, and system robustness.

Written by G A Shanmugha Sundaram

Statement of the Challenge: The ever-growing impacts of global warming have substantially influenced climate change as a direct consequence resulting from urbanization phenomenons worldwide. Several green initiatives have been attempted as of late in urban infrastructure planning and implementation^[1]. These initiatives advance the cause of environmental friendliness in building design and architecture that are aimed at a diversity of contemporary urban landscapes worldwide^[2]. A novel technology is being proposed, that harnesses the power of air drafts blowing over civil structures, which can range anywhere from tiny wisps of air to gale-force winds. Planar arrays numbering in the several thousands of microscopic electric power generation turbines are being deployed. Micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) fabrication technology at the unit level is assembled with the power distribution lines to form a basic 2-D array of regular geometry. Such an array would constitute a self-contained module for power generation and distribution, and can be cascaded to multiple such units on a scale that blends organically with the facades and exterior surfaces of urban high-rise realty infrastructure making it particularly suited for deployment in smart cities.