ON Semiconductor's energy-efficient solutions for smart grid challenges

Many market research institutions predict that by 2030, the share of renewable energy (such as wind power and solar power) in the total global energy consumption will increase significantly. The advocacy of energy conservation, emission reduction and green development has put forward new requirements for all industries. Energy-saving design that caters to the low-carbon economy era has become an important manifestation of the competitiveness of energy companies and electronic products.

Market opportunities and challenges

The development of renewable energy is an irresistible trend. Solar and wind power are components of the smart grid and belong to the category of distributed power generation. Promoting the development of smart grids can bring many advantages, such as using two-way communication to achieve demand-side management, mitigate peak power consumption, quickly detect faults, avoid power outages, and achieve higher energy efficiency, reliability and safety; intelligently integrate new alternative energy sources and provide power for electric and hybrid vehicles; better adjust energy supply and demand, use power plants and power grids more efficiently, and reduce carbon emissions; provide dynamic rate tables to help customers optimize total power consumption and electricity bills, and improve customer service; and remote meter reading and remote power on and off can save labor costs and improve operational efficiency.

Under the consensus of promoting sustainable development, China is currently vigorously developing industries such as solar energy and wind energy, and the prospects are promising. Among them, the technology in the field of solar energy has become increasingly mature, and solar power generation has made great progress. Solar street lighting is also becoming more and more popular. In addition, in order to introduce a new generation of smart grids and improve the power infrastructure, the Chinese government has set a grand goal of investing 4 trillion yuan by 2020, and the concept of "Strong & Smart Grid" has been demonstrated at the Shanghai World Expo.

However, there are also many challenges in developing renewable energy and upgrading the existing power grid. For the semiconductor industry, the biggest challenge is energy conversion, because the key to developing renewable energy is to optimize energy efficiency. Take solar-powered LED street lighting as an example. This application requires efficient and reliable solar panel charging controllers , as well as key devices such as LED drivers, and the demand is considerable. Smart grids also require many electronic components from power generation, distribution and field area networks to smart meter communications and home area networks. These include power factor controllers, AC-DC and DC -DC controllers, regulators, MOSFETs , triacs, power line carrier modems, filtering, input/output (I/O) and data protection, line drivers and signal amplifiers, LCD backlight drivers, EEPROM memories and smart card interfaces.

Examples of energy-efficient solutions for smart grids

1. Solutions to improve the photovoltaic conversion efficiency of solar panels

In recent years, the industry has paid more and more attention to street lighting using renewable clean energy solar energy. For solar street lights, it is very important to improve the photoelectric conversion efficiency of solar panels. The voltage-current (VI) characteristic curve of solar panels is nonlinear and variable, and it is very difficult to obtain the maximum amount of electricity from them. This requires the charging controller and other related electronic circuits of solar LED street lights (generally implemented by microcontrollers) to use effective control methods as much as possible to improve energy efficiency.