Empowering new energy with digital technology

Text/Wang Weimin

2019 is a crucial year for promoting the consumption of new energy. According to data released by the National Energy Administration, in the first half of this year, the national wind power abandonment rate dropped by 4.0 percentage points year-on-year, and the solar power abandonment rate dropped by 1.2 percentage points year-on-year. As the largest power grid company in the world to access new energy, State Grid Corporation of China has taken innovative measures to promote the consumption of new energy.

Recently, the company held a video and telephone conference to promote the construction of new energy cloud, emphasizing that the construction tasks of 14 pilot units will be completed by the end of this year, and will be fully implemented in the company system next year. As the company is about to celebrate the first anniversary of its proposal to build a ubiquitous power Internet of Things, accelerating the construction of new energy cloud is timely and of great significance to promoting the high-quality development of new energy.

The high cost of operation and maintenance of new energy and the difficulty in absorbing it are the core issues. In recent years, the central government has attached great importance to this, taken many measures and achieved certain results. For example, the "Renewable Energy Law of the People's Republic of China" was issued, the "Implementation Plan for Solving the Problems of Abandoned Water, Wind and Light" and the "Clean Energy Absorption Action Plan (2018-2020)" were formulated. The company also took positive actions to issue and implement 30 key measures in six aspects to promote the absorption of new energy, serving the sustainable development of the new energy industry from the aspects of power grid construction, dispatching and operation, market transactions, and technological innovation. In the first half of this year, the utilization rate of new energy in the company's operating area was 96.1%, an increase of 2.8 percentage points year-on-year, and the results are worthy of recognition. However, it cannot be ignored that the development of the new energy industry has not yet formed an effective ecological mechanism to reduce operation and maintenance costs and solve the problem of absorption difficulties.

In the long run, the foundation of the new energy industry is still relatively weak. In particular, without policy support and price subsidies, it still faces limitations such as high development costs, difficulty in breaking through key technologies, and insufficient stability. For example, new energy power generation is characterized by randomness and volatility. Once climatic conditions are restricted, wind turbines and photovoltaic panels will have no electricity to generate. In the case of volatility, it is easy to generate large impact currents, which will have a serious impact on the safety and stability of the power grid. It is estimated that by 2050, China's energy development will have "two 50%s", that is, in the energy production link, the proportion of non-fossil energy in primary energy will exceed 50%; in the terminal consumption link, the proportion of electricity in terminal energy consumption will exceed 50%. To better develop new energy, the effective way to solve the problem lies in cultivating a benign ecological environment, empowering the new energy industry with digital technology, and building a new industrial ecosystem, rather than developing in a single or "sweeping the snow in front of each door" way.

There are multiple stakeholders in the new energy industry chain, including the government, power grid companies, power generation companies, equipment manufacturers, design service companies, and investment institutions. Relying on the new energy cloud, aggregating all parties in the industry, breaking professional barriers and industry barriers, tearing down "data chimneys", and jointly building a new energy industry ecosystem that fully supports each other online and offline, and forming a new development model that integrates cross-industry, cross-professional, and cross-regional development, is an effective path for the high-quality development of new energy. Such market logic has been successfully verified in the consumer field.

After the catering company Haidilao went to the cloud, it established an enterprise middle platform to achieve "one thousand faces for one thousand people". Users can find their favorite dishes, soup bases and other information as long as they open the APP, and even exclusive discounts and promotions are also provided. At the same time, Haidilao rationally selects regions to open new stores based on data such as customer preferences and spending power, quickly makes profits, and constantly fissions, becoming a new expert in the catering industry in playing with the digital economy. This shows that only when enterprises have a strong cloud computing basic platform, use new technologies such as big data, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, seize market segments, and actively cultivate new formats and new models, new business opportunities and experiences will naturally come one after another, allowing enterprises to enjoy the "dividends" of going to the cloud first.

Every industry has its own super label. New energy is not only synonymous with green, sustainable, and high-quality, but also a "showroom" of intelligence, ubiquity, and the Internet of Things. Further improve the penetration rate of digitalization and intelligence, create new applications, solve the problem of consumption, and expand the market pie. In the new journey of promoting energy transformation and development, the new energy cloud will surely tell a new story of high-quality development of the new energy industry.