Energy disaggregation is the process of disaggregating a household's total energy consumption into its appliance-level components. One of the limitations of energy disaggregation is its generalization capacity, which can be defined as the ability of the model to analyze new households. In this article, a new energy disaggregation approach based on adversarial autoencoder (AAE) is proposed to create a generative model and enhance the generalization capacity. The proposed method has a probabilistic structure to handle uncertainties in the unseen data. By transforming the latent space from a deterministic structure to a Gaussian prior distribution, AAEs decoder transforms into a generative model. The proposed approach is validated through experimental tests using two different datasets. The experimental results exhibit a 55% MAE performance increase compared to deterministic models and 7% compared to probabilistic models. In addition, considering the predictions made when the appliances are on , the AAE improves the performance by 16% for UKDALE and 36% for REDD dataset compared to the state-of-art models. Moreover, the online analysis performance of AAE is examined in detail, and the disadvantages of instant predictions and the possible solutions are extensively discussed.

The need for affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy is now more important than ever because of the climate crisis. Climate change will push up to 130 million people into poverty over the next 10 years and continue to cause more unpredictable natural disasters, such as cyclones, flooding, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. Power outages do not occur only in remote rural areas but also in developed countries, lasting for several hours and even a couple of days, due to the extreme weather in recent years. Microgrids, as a flexible architecture capable of integrating local distributed energy resources (DERs), can satisfy wide-ranging demands via their variable solutions, from off-grid to on-grid applications.

This paper presents a novel hierarchical Internet of Things (IoT)-based scheme for Microgrid-Enabled Intelligent Buildings to achieve energy digitalization and automation with a renewable energy self-consumption strategy. Firstly, a hierarchical structure of Microgrid-Enabled Intelligent Buildings is designed to establish a two-dimensional fusion layered architecture for the microgrid to interact with the composite loads of buildings. The building blocks and functions of each layer are defined specifically. Secondly, to achieve transparent information fusion and interactive cooperation between the supply-side and demand-side, a state transition mechanism driven by a combination of time and events is proposed to activate the real-time and mutual response of generation and loads dynamically. Thirdly, based on the above hierarchical fusion structure and data-driven state transition mechanism, a power balance control algorithm driven by a self-consumption strategy is further proposed to achieve the autonomous balance of supply and demand. Finally, the IoT Microgrid Laboratory at Aalborg University is introduced to show how to implement this novel hierarchical IoT-based scheme in a Microgrid-Enabled Intelligent Building, and the power consensus control method based on the state transition mechanism is verified to achieve a renewable energy self-consumption strategy.

Solar light pipes originally refer to the light tube for introducing lights for lighting purpose. The solar light pipes in buildings realize the lightening use of solar energy by taking full advantage of natural daylight which is encouraging by Chinese government these years. The status of research and development of solar light pipes are analyzed in this paper, and at the same time, the problems need to be solved for the implementation of solar light pipes in China are proposed .Solar light pipes are needed in Chinese buildings such as office buildings, stadiums, public toilets, garbage disposal plants, basement, garage, mines, rooms in dark side and other public facilities or industrial buildings. The development of this technique needs to be vigorously supported by national policies and prototype projects need to be established. Problems need to be solved such as dust accumulation and condensation. Research efforts need to be increased on solar light pipes and people's awareness of energy-saving need to be improved in China. If the problems of application gap of solar light pipes in China mentioned in this paper to be solved, and with the price depreciated, solar light pipes will be popular in China in near future.