Aiming at the problem that the traditional manual inspection method and wired communication method are difficult to meet the demand for partial discharge (PD) detection of large-scale power equipment, this paper designs an intelligent partial discharge sensing system for power grid equipment based on the Internet of things. Firstly, the overall framework of the intelligent PD sensing system for power grid equipment is proposed, and the required software and hardware configuration and the selection of PD detection sensors are given; the PD detection process is further designed, and different principles of PD detection are analyzed, the noise of PD is reduced by the discharge signal analysis method of resonance sparse decomposition; the network model of the intelligent partial discharge sensing system for power grid equipment is designed, including sensor nodes, sink nodes and access nodes. Visual display and practical application prove the feasibility of the designed system.