Communication Technologies Requirement for Energy Hubs: A survey

Over the last 100 years, no change has been in the power grid infrastructure. Through experiments, it became clear that the top-down central power grids are not suited to the needs of the twenty-first century. The new energy revolution by considering multi-energy carriers, not just electricity, represents an opportunity to improve the system and will have a revolutionary impact on the future power grids. To meet current power grid challenges, a new concept of the energy hub has emerged. The energy hub can be considered as a modern electric power grid infrastructure that contains different types of energy sources and generation with multi-type energy storage devices to feed electrical, heating and gas demands. The new energy hub needs a more complex and different one, because its size is much larger, while traditional energy systems rely on a strong infrastructure of information and communication. This paper focuses on critical issues related to technologies of energy hub in the first place with regard to information and communication technology (ICT). This paper main objective is presenting a contemporary view of the current state of the art in the field of energy hub communications as well as to discuss research issues that remain open in this area. This paper is expected to provide a better understanding of the energy hub technologies, benefits and research challenges and raise the interest of the community of research to explore this promising research area.