In recent years, a series of measures (e.g. “internet+” smart energy, electricity market reform, new energy revolution) have taken place and triggered power system’s information explosion which leads to massive power equipment, electrical appliances and users need to connect. The information is perceived, connected, transmitted, processed, applied, and published in an ever-widening scope and the scale has become larger and larger and complex high-dimensional dynamic systems have emerged, accompanied by massive data sets. However, when dealing with such problems, centralized signal processing has the disadvantages of heavy communication burden, high computational complexity, poor scalability, and poor robustness. Obviously, the centralized signal processing method is not applicable and requires new models and new algorithms. It is necessary to propose a new signal processing solution (i.e. the distributed signal processing) to large scale and complex high-dimensional dynamic power/energy systems. This paper gives an overview of the distributed sensing and cooperative estimation/detection of complex power/energy system and draws the conclusion about challenges and research interests in the future. This work is supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFB0900100).