The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Towards Energy 4.0 in Kazakhstan

Large-scale changes in technological advancements will lead to large scale innovations and stimulation of economic growth across the globe. Nowadays, as the leading industrialized economies move to intelligent manufacturing, called industry 4.0, there is a growing impact on the energy sector in any country. The latter may be referred to as Energy 4.0, which incorporates the period of mechanization, the gas and oil era, and the new digital revolution with renewable energy era. Generation, distribution, consumption and smart production of energy - all of these are going to experience an enormous revolutionary changes due to technologies as big data, IoT and cloud computing. This work describes the current state of art of Energy 4.0 in Kazakhstan, its future potential, benefits, challenges and the vision of government to introduce further discussions in the formation of a new technological revolution of Industry 4.0 that will have fundamental and structural nature. The article analyzes the global industrial revolutions and the relevant global energy steps implemented over the past 10 years by illustrating it through Networked Readiness Index (NRI) charts, that show the positions of Kazakhstan by different criteria established of reliable international organizations. Moreover, paper presents the experience of the Energy 4.0 strategy development in technologically advanced countries. In this work, we also offer the approaches and proposals associated with the Industry 4.0 strategy adaptation to the Kazakhstani energy sector, which can be taken as a basis for the new industry development strategy during the upcoming global technological changes.