Navigating the digital landscape: A review of digitalization in smart grids with renewable energy sources

Abstract

The energy domain worldwide is experiencing high transformative pressure due to the imperative of climate change and new opportunities brought by various rapidly evolving digital technologies. Particularly, this change is affecting smart grids (SGs), which are increasingly shifting toward utilizing renewable and distributed energy sources. The natural intermittency of these energy sources increases the complexity of SG operations, such as ensuring continuity of energy supply and demand response balancing. In mitigation of these challenges, the tools and complex approaches that digitalization can provide have shown themselves particularly advantageous. There is a solid body of work showing how technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), distributed ledgers, edge and cloud computing, machine learning (ML), etc., can be applied to address a variety of technical and economic problems in the energy sector, emphasizing SGs. This paper presents the most comprehensive literature review to date on digitalization in renewable energy source-based SGs, synthesizing over 200 studies across data analytics, artificial intelligence and ML, digital twins, edge–fog–cloud computing, the IoT, advanced metering infrastructure, and distributed ledger technologies. Unlike previous reviews, which are often limited to a single technology or narrow application, this work provides a cross-technology synthesis linking technical and financial aspects, identifies consolidated research gaps, and proposes a unified research agenda. The review further highlights future trends, including large language models, 6G communications, and distributed autonomous organizations, and discusses their implications for both industry practice and academic research.