Yu Qing: The ideal and reality of energy internet

China Energy Storage Network News : From May 19th to 21st, the "8th China International Energy Storage Conference" was grandly held in Shenzhen. More than 1,500 representatives from government agencies, research institutes, industry organizations, power companies, new energy project units, system integrators and other countries and regions from China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Australia and other countries and regions attended the conference.

Yu Qing, deputy general manager of Hangzhou Shuyuan Information Technology Co., Ltd., delivered a wonderful speech entitled "The Ideal and Reality of Energy Internet" at the "Energy Internet and Multi-energy Complementarity Special Session".

The speech is as follows:

Yu Qing : Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to communicate with you. I used to work in the State Grid Zhejiang Company, doing business related to smart grid and power marketing. Now that I have resigned, I mainly work on energy Internet or smart grid-related applications related to the load side and the user side. I look at the energy Internet more from the perspective of the load side and the user side, and more from the perspective of practical engineering business.

The introduction is divided into three parts: First, what is the ideal of energy technology, what is the idea behind the technological evolution, and how is it different from the idea of ​​production, construction and operation of traditional power grids. Second, what opportunities will there be in the future power market environment. Third, the current reality, how can enterprises lay out the energy Internet before the power market is fully opened?

The essence of the energy internet is computing and intelligence. Human beings use energy in this way. Among these links, there are two main trends: one is the improvement of energy utilization density. From the earliest burning of wood to burning charcoal to burning coal to burning oil, the energy density has been continuously improved. The energy utilization density and energy density of energy storage have dropped. The energy density of a tank of oil in a car and the energy density of electrochemical energy storage in a battery of the same volume have decreased. I think this is very interesting. Another main line is the improvement of the intelligent level of energy utilization. I personally think that the essence of our human use of energy is the orderly use of energy. Order means transforming energy and energy from a high entropy state to a low entropy state. The reduction of entropy is negative entropy. The essence of entropy is computing, which is intelligence. This is what I think is the essence of the informatization of the energy internet.

From the perspective of intelligence, the level of intelligence of the energy system. After millions of years of evolution, the human energy system has become an energy utilization system with a high level of intelligence. Humans have energy storage. When they exercise, they have primary frequency modulation, secondary frequency modulation, and tertiary frequency modulation. The secondary frequency modulation of the power grid depends on the function of glucose. The tertiary frequency modulation and the tertiary frequency modulation of the power grid, from minute to hour level frequency modulation, people mainly rely on burning protein and fat. From this perspective, people also have digestion, transmission and control, which have a clear correspondence with our social energy system. So the biggest thing this picture wants to express is that our society's energy system, whether it is the power grid or oil and gas, has a lot of room for intelligent improvement.

If you feel that you cannot see the future direction clearly, I personally prefer to think about the power of the human body. Is centralized energy storage better or distributed energy storage better? People have both energy storage methods, which are a combination of centralized and distributed. Have you noticed that in the past 10 years or even the past 5 years, the industrial development speed of energy or energy Internet has been accelerating. That is, many new technologies and new companies that were not heard of 10 years ago have continued to appear in recent years. Before the energy Internet and smart grid, the development of many companies or technologies was based on 10, 20 or even decades of iterative evolution. In the Internet stage, the evolution of this industry is accelerating, and new species are constantly emerging. I think this is very interesting, just like the Internet. The essence of energy Internet is the collision of two ways of thinking. I don’t think any kind of thinking is particularly good or bad, only which industry or scenario is more suitable. What is the thinking of traditional power grid companies? A mechanical thinking, the characteristic of mechanical thinking is that the forecast of future market demand can be accurately predicted. When planning a power grid, the first step of power grid planning must be to make load forecasts. If the load forecast is inaccurate, the power grid will either be ahead or behind. It must rely on the accuracy of the planned forecast, from top to bottom. The production and operation of the entire construction are highly planned. The entire power grid from production and construction to operation depends on the plan. So from the perspective of grid connection, innovation or product development is a gradual evolutionary process. However, the energy Internet is a biological thinking, more like an Internet enterprise. The characteristic of Internet enterprises is evolution. The market environment they face is highly uncertain. In the future, under the condition of electricity marketization, price changes will be very drastic, and the load fluctuations will also be very drastic. The energy Internet has to face highly uncertain markets and demands. Therefore, the evolutionary thinking of the energy Internet is multi-scale and multi-level adaptive evolution, so it has basic characteristics, dynamic, flexible and emergent. The virtual power plant is an emergent control, which brings together multiple load sources and distributed power sources, presenting a completely different state from traditional power plants. It is an emergent and self-organizing method. Which type of energy Internet survives is determined by the market, and your iteration speed and product adaptability determine your future.

I think the energy internet is disruptive to the existing power system construction and operation model. The traditional power industry is an inverted triangle, that is, the transmission network is very strong, the distribution network is in the middle, and the power consumption side is managed at the bottom. In our traditional sense, there is a saying that it is useless to focus on transmission and neglect distribution. When the transmission system is very strong and there is ultra-high voltage, the complexity of the system will be greatly increased. It uses the high reliability of the main grid to support the uncertainty of the load below, including the volatility of the distributed power below, which is also supported by the capacity and reliability of the large power grid and distribution network. This is our existing power grid for distributed and load management. With the energy internet, the inverted triangle will become an equilateral triangle in the future, that is, when the power consumption side is highly flexible, such as flexible load, and there are microgrids and energy storage, it can maintain itself for a period of time in extreme cases. At this time, I don’t need the large grid to provide me with particularly high reliability. For example, 99.9, the reliability of the last 9 is supported by the flexibility of the terminal. I don’t need you to pay for 99.99 on the large grid. This may be more advantageous in terms of price and cost. In the future, with the Internet of Things of various energy devices as the core and high flexibility at the end, new business and technology models will become possible. The lower end of the triangle of the future energy Internet will become particularly flexible.

Our understanding of the energy internet is that the internet connects people, while the energy internet connects machines. People cannot directly use electricity. Energy producers are machines and equipment, energy transmitters are machines and equipment, and energy consumers are machines and equipment. The energy internet has two key features: M2M and AI. Artificial intelligence in the true sense of machines will have a deeper integration with the energy internet, because the energy internet is essentially a machine network.

The previous discussion was about the ideal energy Internet.

There are two dimensions to the understanding of energy internet: 1. The technical dimension, the network of energy internet, the technical system that evolves towards a smarter one. As many experts have said before, microgrids, source-grid-load-storage, automatic load response, etc., are all technical aspects to improve the intelligence of energy internet. 2. Energy internet, drawing on the Internet thinking, brings us some new business models in the process of energy production, trading and utilization. It is energy internet in a commercial sense, such as distributed power generation trading, market trading on the electricity sales side, etc. In the energy internet and the environment of electricity marketization, more new business models will emerge on the end-use side. The most important thing for all business models is to guide the most effective allocation of energy resources or power resources through spot prices under the actual spot electricity prices. Under the spot prices, our users and investors will calculate for themselves whether it is more cost-effective to invest in energy storage, to respond to demand, or to buy electricity from the large grid under the spot prices. Without the fluctuation of spot prices, the effectiveness of resource allocation cannot be reflected most clearly under the existing catalog. This is the fundamental significance of spot prices to energy storage.