This article deals with a thorough investigation of the energy internet towards future emerging technologies for energy distribution and management to solve existing limitations and enhance the performance of future sustainable energy. In consequence, a comprehensive review of energy internet features, applications, methods and existing issues and challenges are explained by developing arguments for future prospects. Key features of the energ. This article deals with a thorough investigation of the energy internet towards future emerging technologies for energy distribution and management to solve existing limitations and enhance the performance of future sustainable energy. In consequence, a comprehensive review of energy internet features, applications, methods and existing issues and challenges are explained by developing arguments for future prospects. Key features of the energy internet such as energy sources, communication technologies, data computation, energy management systems and financial analysis are highlighted to enhance the energy efficiency, reliability, and security of the power network. Different energy internet application architectures and models are demonstrated for regulatory bodies under different dimensional concepts, networks, and layers. This article also explains the energy internet methods related to different programming approaches, artificial intelligence, and optimization algorithms for achieving granted reliability and enabling a decentralized energy market with a two-way energy flow. Furthermore, the present review focuses on the various issues and challenges of existing energy internet platforms related to safety, security, standards, protocols, costing and complexity as well as provides recommendations for future energy internet toward efficient energy distribution and management. Moreover, the study analyzes the impact of the energy internet on the conventional power grid and provides a global landscape of en. ••Energy internet enhances performance of energy management for sustainable energy.••A comprehensive review on energy internet is demonstrated for future prospects.••Energy internet features are highlighted to enhance efficiency, security and reliability.••Energy internet architectures and models are demonstrated for regulatory bodies.••Energy distributionEnergy internetEnergy managementEnergy storageElectric vehicleRenewable energyThe energy demand is increasing day by day which raises the consumption of fossil fuels significantly causing global warming and depletion in air quality problems (Bistline and Blanford, 2021;Bastida et al., 2019). To address these issues, many research works have been conducted to search for clean and alternative sources of energy (Reza et al., 2023). Hence, the demand for distributed renewable energy sources (RES) specifically solar and wind energy and related energy storage systems (ESSs) has received extensive consideration in recent years (Abu et al., 2023). However, the RES and ESS integration into the grid results in voltage, frequency fluctuation, grid synchronizations and power quality problems (Al-Shetwi et al., 2020; Hannan et al., 2020a). In recent times, the smart grid offers two-way flows of electricity and information in distributed energy sources through smart meters and sensors in real-time (He et al., 2017; Uludag et al., 2016). The execution of the smart grid is promising; nevertheless, it lacks in delivering an efficient form of energy when the power system has a high volume of loads leading to complexity and variability issues. In addition, the smart grid has limited flexibility concerning two-way electricity flows, scheduling, routing and resource utilization (Das et al., 2020; Reka and Dragicevic, 2018). Moreover, the traditional smart grid has also faced several challenges and issues such as; interoperability among various grid components, data handling and management across a wide geographic. The literature survey was conducted using different platforms including Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Explore and ScienceDirect. This survey adopts content analysis to extract the key information and conduct the analysis. Three screening and assessment phases were employed to select the relevant literature. Subsequently, a total of 654 articles were identified after the first screening as shown in Fig. 1. The article selection through the second screening phase was performed using the essential keywords including energy internet, energy router, renewable energy, energy storage, energy management, energy distribution, and electric vehicle. A total of 368 articles are found after the second screening in which the paper title, abstract, subjects, and contributions are evaluated to explore the relevant articles for this stage.The final selection of the article is carried out using the impact factor, citations and review process. In sum, the review, analysis and critical discussion relating to EI-based energy management, distributions, and methods in different applications along with issues and challenges are conducted using the final filtered 156 articles. Several key findings were achieved through the three screening phases which can be divided into five groups including (a) the key features of EI were reviewed; (b) various potential applications of EI were highlighted; (c) different methods employed in EI were explored; (d) numerou.
