Research and analysis of energy internet from the perspective of NSFC

Energy Internet (EI) is an emerging discipline that integrates cooling, heating, power and gas in physical, information and value flows, so it has a very distinctive interdisciplinary feature. The current situation of EI needs to be sorted out and summarized in time, so as to provide a reference for its future development. To some extent, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) reflects the research focus and trend of EI in China. Therefore, this paper tries to analyse the programs of EI from the perspective of NSFC, the results revealed that 1) EI becomes a research hot point of combined cooling, heating and power instead of electricity only after micro grid and smart grid. Also, this is one of the reasons that researches on EI mostly focus on the electrical science and engineering currently; 2) One of the purposes for EI is to solve the problem of abandoning wind and light energy;3) The number of NSFC supporting programs involving the topics of EI, multi-energy complementarity and integrated energy system accounts for 43% of 124 EI-related funds totally; 4) The distribution of the NSFC supporting programs about EI reveals the crossing and integration of multiple disciplines, such as electronics and information systems, computer science, automation, management science and engineering, mathematics.