New understanding on information’s role in the matching of supply and demand of distributed energy system

According to the entropy theory, the increase in the thermodynamic entropy of energy is reduced under the control of the information entropy. However, the quantitative analysis of this process remains difficult. In this study, energy properties are conferred upon information to enable an uncertain event to be measured. First, the entropy theory was adopted to describe the uncertainty of the energy in a distributed energy system. Further, a method was devised to optimize the configurations of the distributed energy system based on minimize total entropy generation. Finally, using the example of load forecasting, the impact of introducing information in the form of negative entropy on the ability of the system to improve the alignment between supply and demand is quantitatively elucidated. The negative entropy caused by information utilization increased from 356.14 to 638.68 kWh/K, with the load forecasting errors decreased from 30% to 10%. The information entropy was also applied to describe the uncertainty of the On-site energy fraction, by increasing the capacity of energy storage, the uncertainty decreased from 1.81 to 1.80 nat, while the load forecasting could decreased it to 1.71 nat, 1.54 nat, 1.29 nat with the load forecasting errors at 30%, 20% and 10%, respectively.