The macro energy thinking which regards electricity as a hub between energy production and consumption

can promote “clean energy substitution” of the upstream primary energy and “electricity substitution” of the downstream end-use energy

in order to support the sustainable development of energy. Meanwhile the big data thinking regards various data resources as fundamental elements of production rather than simple process objects. The integration of these thinking will make the big data on power become the foundation of an extensively interconnected

openly interactive and highly intelligent macro energy system. Key elements of this integration include the acquirement

transmission and storage of wide-area power data with different timescales

the data from related domains

as well as the fast and in-depth knowledge extraction from the multi-source heterogeneous data and its applications. As the first part of a series of paper

this paper summarizes unique features of big data based on the deduction of the basic concept

data structures and essential characteristics of big data. For the comprehensive energy network

a knowledge extraction platform is constructed by integrating the causal data (based on mathematical models)

the statistic data (with non-causal relationship) and the gambling data (of human participants). More case studies will be proposed in the subsequent paper

which will show the contributions of big data thinking to enhance the economy and reliability of macro energy systems. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61533010)

NSFC-EPSRC Collaborative Project (No. 513111025-2013)

China-Thailand Cooperation Fund Project (No. 5151101161)

and State Grid Corporation of China.