Chinese oil giant China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has signed a strategic partnership agreement with leading internet company Tencent to promote the internet transformation of energy companies, in line with the country's Internet Plus strategy, reports Yicai, the online portal of Shanghai's China Business News.

Proposed by Premier Li Keqiang in March, the Internet Plus strategy encourages the application of the internet in traditional industries such as manufacturing and energy to boost efficiency and productivity.

According to the deal, the two parties will leverage each other's resources, channels and core business abilities to collaborate in the areas of mobile payment, internet finance, online-to-offline (O2O) business, medical care, tourism, group-buying as well as membership management. Tencent will also provide cloud computing services and big data applications given CNPC's massive generation of energy consumption data.

Previous to the agreement, the two companies had started to collaborate in online top-up services and online marketing through WeChat, Tencent's instant messaging app.

In the power sector, the State Grid Corporation of China has been promoting smart power grids with its mountain of sales data. Earlier last week on May 26, the Sichuan branch of the State Grid signed strategic agreement with Tencent to work towards the Internet Plus power grid strategy.

The country's National Energy Administration has arranged conferences gathering enterprises and energy experts to study the energy internet and related issues, including its function, architecture, key technologies, business models and an evaluation system.

Energy internet is a kind of business model that needs diversified market participants and is likely to cover different energy sectors such as electricity, heat, and gas. No single company is capable of building a energy internet on its own, said Miao Jen, the associate research fellow of Energy Research Institute (NRI) of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).