GCL starts energy internet model

China Energy Storage Network: From cogeneration to natural gas integration, from solar energy manufacturing to new energy power station development, the nearly 30-year-old GCL has once again embarked on a journey. Different from the previous industrial chain extension and business transformation, this time, GCL has to face the "big era" of energy system transformation towards diversification, mobility and fragmentation. On October 20, at the 2018 Smart Energy Development Summit Forum, GCL released the "Xinneng Cloud" system, officially starting GCL's "Internet +" smart energy journey.

The era of fragmentation has arrived

According to statistics from the International Energy Agency, the comprehensive average cost of new energy has dropped significantly in the past 10 years, with wind power's comprehensive cost down by 70% and photovoltaic power's comprehensive cost down by 80%. It is predicted that photovoltaic power will become the most economical way of generating electricity from 2020 to 2030.

From the coal era to the oil and gas era, with the rise of new energy, electricity is returning to the center of energy. Distributed photovoltaics, decentralized wind power, electric vehicles, and energy storage devices are pushing energy from a centralized and unified era to a diversified and fragmented era.

In the view of Zhu Gongshan, chairman of GCL Group, the energy system is entering a more independent, flexible and intelligent distributed era. The energy Internet will interact intelligently with the industrial Internet and the Internet of Things. The "three major ecological data" of electricity, production and travel will become the most valuable data assets. The four flows of "energy flow, information flow, capital flow and product flow" will be integrated into one, and the "era of personalized energy use" has arrived.

"However, in the era of personalized energy consumption, users' energy needs include not only electricity, but also heating, cooling, and even power and transportation. How to provide the most efficient energy services in the best way and the most economical combination is a major challenge we face. The core is the economic issue, that is, how to help users save money or make money." Yang Lei, senior adviser to the director of the International Energy Agency, believes.

User is king

From large power plants, large power grids, centralized and long-distance "electricity from afar" to small power sources, decentralized, diversified and fragmented "electricity generated nearby", the transformation of the energy system has brought about a change in the user group. GCL Group said that as an enterprise and product provider, it faces not only hundreds of thousands of industrial users, but also hundreds of millions of commercial individual users.

In the field of smart energy, GCL Group has intelligently integrated the power grid, heat network, natural gas pipeline network, and information network through the energy internet, and achieved rapid response and interconnection and deployment of energy microgrids and regional energy networks with the support of big data cloud platforms. Relying on the technical advantages of distributed energy, "six-in-one" microgrids, and power demand-side centralized control platforms, it actively expands incremental distribution and power sales businesses. Many projects have been included in the national new energy microgrid demonstration projects, incremental distribution network projects, multi-energy complementary integrated optimization demonstration projects, and "Internet +" smart energy demonstration projects.

GCL believes that in an era where users are king, ubiquitous user resources will be the most important entrance and exit for future smart energy. "On the basis of mastering user resources, the second step is to conduct accurate and in-depth analysis and research on users, and ultimately provide customized services based on users' personalized needs."

Fei Zhi, President of GCL Smart Energy, said: "The era of traditional single power generation and single transmission is gone forever. We have fully opened the era of 'Internet +' smart energy. The energy development in the new era has put forward requirements for us to be clean, intelligent, efficient, safe and reliable."

Based on the concept of "users are king", in order to meet the personalized and diversified energy needs of users in the new era, GCL's "Xinneng Cloud" system was born. The system is based on the supply of multi-energy distributed energy, mainly wind, light, storage, and natural gas, supplemented by regional external power supply access, to build a regional energy Internet platform that brings together "grid, heat network, gas network, and information network", to achieve the connectivity, coupling, interaction, and coordination of business flow, energy flow, and information flow, and to provide regional users with stable, safe, and efficient energy use services and possible value-added benefits.

As a typical example of a city driven by energy demand, Suzhou is becoming a "test field" for GCL Smart Energy's concept of smart energy. The Suzhou Industrial Park Multi-energy Complementary Integrated Optimization Project built by GCL Smart Energy stood out from hundreds of application projects. Based on the construction of a comprehensive clean energy system, it provides efficient and clean energy support for the industrial park through energy Internet, big data, multi-energy complementary integrated optimization, demand-side management and other technical means, becoming a label for Suzhou's energy transformation and development.

How to break the deadlock

Zhao Dongyuan, director of the Engineering Application Research Office of Tsinghua University's Energy Internet Innovation Institute, believes that the energy Internet not only involves the most basic hardware and physical equipment, but more importantly, it is about maximizing the intelligence of the whole society. "Urban energy transformation requires not only a change in the way energy is configured and operated, but also a change in the way energy is thought about."

Wang Zhixuan, full-time vice president of the China Electricity Council, believes that power transformation depends not only on technological innovation but also on institutional revolution. Therefore, the barriers that hinder the decentralized and fragmented application of energy must be broken.

Obviously, as a traditional energy manufacturing company, GCL needs to make major adjustments to its way of thinking and concepts in order to transform from an energy producer to a comprehensive energy service provider.

Holding user resources may be GCL's biggest advantage at present. For more than 20 years, GCL has focused on industrial parks in economically developed regions such as the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, vigorously deployed cogeneration and various clean energy sources, and accumulated rich successful experience in project development, operation, and construction, as well as a large number of users.

In the era of energy internet, in addition to energy digitalization companies such as ENN and Envision, there are also cross-border companies such as Huawei and Alibaba that have brought their Internet technology advantages. Just as Tesla has subverted the traditional automobile manufacturing industry, the digitalization puzzle of the energy industry may also be broken by the outside world.

As a pioneer of China's mixed-ownership power companies, can the photovoltaic company GCL become the king of digital energy? This depends largely on whether it can better understand energy and users.