Future outlook on 6G technology for renewable energy sources (RES)

Abstract

As the renewable energy sources (RES) continues to grow in power system due to emissions decarbonisation and sustainability policies, a fast and reliable connection between RES components and equipment is crucial to ensure quality power delivery. This review provides a detailed insight into the full potential in 6G for the acceleration of RES with the faster and stable data bandwidth. The potential applications of 6G wireless networks for faster data processing in RES include P2P energy trade market, vehicular network, wireless energy transfer, energy management system, smart grid, self-healing, smart batteries and AI-based weather forecasting. This paper also lists the advantages and challenges of 6G in RES sectors, the practical implementations and the potential applications. It was found out that although the 6G is a visionary application in the RES sector to improve the security, connectivity, integration and sensory data processing of RES, 6G still possesses various technical limitations, including incompatibility issues of older devices, higher power consumption and higher operating cost. Future research should focus on the improvements of 6G in RES in terms of cost-effectiveness, compatibility issues and power consumption to balance between the advancement and limitations. This review serves as a visionary for 6G wireless communication to be applied in the RES sector in the near future. 6G in the RES sector encountered several critical limitations needing an intensive development, including still the issues of security and privacy, prone to hacking or data bleaching, required advanced hardware support and requirements for ultra-fast communications with low latency.