In the energy regulation based varibable-speed electrohydraulic drive system, the supply energy and the demanded energy, which will affect the control performance greatly, are crucial. However, they are hard to be obtained via conventional methods for some reasons. This paper tries to a new route: the definitive numerical values of the supply energy and the demanded energy are not required, except for their relationship which is called energy state. A three-layer back propagation(BP) neural network was built up to act as an energy analysis unit to deduce the energy state. The neural network has three inputs: the reference displacement, the actual displacement of cylinder rod and the system flowrate supply. The output of the neural network is energy state. A Chebyshev type II filter was designed to calculate the cylinder speed for the estimation of system flowrate supply. The training and testing samples of neural network were collected by the system accurate simulation model. After off-line training, the neural network was tested by the testing data. And the testing result demonstrates that the designed neural network was successful. Then, the neural network acts as the energy analysis unit in real-time experiments of cylinder position control, where it works efficiently under square-wave and sine-wave reference displacement. The experimental results validate its feasibility and adaptability. Only a position sensor and some pressure sensors, which are cheap and have quick dynamic response, are necessary for the system control. And the neural network plays the role of identifying the energy state.