The first single-unit 10MW bidirectional energy storage inverter was launched to promote the large-scale application of electrochemical energy storage

Shanghai's high-end manufacturing has made another major breakthrough! On May 28, the world's first single-unit 10MW bidirectional energy storage inverter independently developed by Shanghai Yidian's Zhongneng Smart Energy and Shanghai Baozhun Power Supply was unveiled at the 12th International Solar Photovoltaic and Smart Energy (Shanghai) Exhibition. The successful development and launch of this device marks that Shanghai has reached the international leading level in energy storage technology and key equipment.

In recent years, with the advent of the low-carbon era, new energy industries represented by photovoltaic and wind power generation have risen rapidly, but they have also brought considerable challenges. Yu Jiangang, chairman of the Shanghai Electric Tool Research Institute, said that new energy power generation has the characteristics of dispersion, volatility, and intermittency. New energy distributed power supply has extremely high requirements for the stability, safety, and efficiency of the power grid. If the stability of the power grid is not achieved, once it is connected to the power grid, it will bring hidden dangers to the safety and stability of the power grid.

Especially in my country's "Three Norths" region, there is an abundance of new energy sources such as wind power, but the demand for electricity is insufficient, making it difficult to consume locally. In addition, due to the difficulty of connecting to the grid, a lot of electricity can only be discarded. In some areas, the abandonment rate once reached more than 30%, and many photovoltaic power plants can only "sunbathe" after they are built, which casts a shadow on the development of the new energy industry.

How to solve this problem? The rapid development of energy storage technology, especially electrochemical energy storage technology, provides a reliable way to solve the harm caused by unstable power supply of new energy. Yu Jiangang said that the energy storage system can smooth out the fluctuations of the power grid caused by new energy through controlled charging and discharging, and its effectiveness is gradually recognized by experts, scholars and the public. With the increasing scale of new energy construction, the demand for large-scale electrochemical energy storage systems is imminent.

However, how can large-scale energy storage systems quickly respond to and synchronously smooth out unpredictable fluctuations in renewable energy power? The industry needs to break through a number of key technical bottlenecks, and high-power bidirectional energy storage inverters that are responsible for power conversion are one of them.

At present, the actual power of bidirectional energy storage inverters in operation on the market is mostly in the tens-kilowatt or hundreds-kilowatt level. The reason is that as the power increases, the number of internal power modules increases year-on-year, and unstable factors such as resonance and circulating current between modules increase geometrically, which brings great challenges to the stability, consistency and safety of the overall system.

The National 863 Program established a special research direction as early as 2014 - research on key technologies and development of core equipment for photovoltaic microgrids. The technical goal of this national top project is to "develop a 500-kilowatt photovoltaic-energy storage charge controller and a 500-kilowatt self-synchronous voltage source inverter suitable for microgrid systems, and achieve parallel operation of more than 3 units", and the key technologies focus on "large capacity of 500 kilowatts", "self-synchronous voltage source inverters", and "multiple machines in parallel to achieve parallel operation of more than 3 units".

Shanghai Yidian's world's first single-unit 10MW bidirectional energy storage inverter not only raises the national technical target from single-unit 100KW to 10,000KW, but also can operate multiple units in parallel. Industry experts said that the 10MW bidirectional energy storage inverter realizes the self-synchronous voltage source function of the "virtual synchronous machine" operation characteristics, which helps to solve the problem of smooth access of new energy power to the power grid and stable power supply operation. Its innovative parallel connection technology realizes the parallel operation of multiple voltage sources, providing reliable technical guarantee for large-scale energy storage systems.

The 10MW bidirectional energy storage inverter will greatly promote the large-scale application of electrochemical energy storage, making it possible to replace pumped storage. Its modularity and flexible combination will become one of the important options for strategic power sources. It is a core tool for building flexible, safe and controllable large-scale energy storage systems in the future, and an important support for building a widely interconnected, friendly and interactive smart grid in the future.

It is revealed that Shanghai Yidian is currently negotiating with Gansu on the construction of an energy storage power station project, and plans to invest in a 100-megawatt energy storage power station in Gansu to solve the problem of "abandoned electricity". With the operation of the 100-megawatt energy storage power station in the future, it will achieve millisecond-level flexible response, obey dispatch, controlled peak shifting and frequency modulation, absorb surplus electricity from new energy, and smooth out power fluctuations, helping to build a new generation of intelligent, controllable, and flexible smart grids.