Synopsys: Exploring Moore's Law in the Energy Industry

Introduction: Once energy storage technology achieves a breakthrough, chip technology may be applied to energy networks, and the energy industry may also find its own Moore's Law

As the dual carbon goals are becoming more and more a consensus of the whole society, the current discussion on how to achieve the dual carbon goals has gradually shifted from the theoretical and conceptual level to the practical and technical level. In this process, several basic consensuses have gradually been formed: 1. Electricity will be the main form of energy in the future zero-carbon society; 2. The proportion of low-carbon energy represented by wind and light needs to be greatly increased; 3. The efficiency of energy production, transmission and use must continue to improve; 4. Energy consumption needs to be controlled, but carbon reduction does not mean energy reduction, and energy costs should continue to decrease; 5. Digitalization of energy networks is essential.

These basic consensuses are not difficult to understand, but achieving these goals is like the classic problem of "putting an elephant into a refrigerator requires three steps: opening the door, stuffing it in, and closing the door". Many scholars and scientists have also proposed a variety of possible paths to achieve the dual carbon goals.

In the view of Ge Qun, senior vice president of Synopsys, a leading chip design solutions company, and chairman and president of Synopsys China, replicating the energy management and digital modeling capabilities accumulated over the years in the chip design field to the energy field in order to find the "Moore's Law" in the energy industry will not only accelerate the structural changes in the energy industry, but will also provide a huge boost to the achievement of the dual carbon goals.

Chips and dual carbon seem to have limited correlation. But the fundamental logic of the dual carbon goal is to produce energy more cleanly, transmit energy more efficiently, and use energy more intelligently. And these are what chip design has been doing in the past few decades. Ge Qun made an analogy, "Billions or tens of billions of transistors are integrated on a chip. A transistor is equivalent to a unit of electricity consumption, and a chip is equivalent to a large-scale energy network. In fact, in terms of energy consumption model, the complexity of a transistor exceeds the electricity consumption model of a household in reality. Now we are optimizing the energy consumption of each transistor, and the same capability can also be used in energy networks in the future, but the unit has changed from microwatts to watts and kilowatts."

In order to achieve this capability transfer, a large number of technical obstacles need to be overcome, but from a basic model perspective, energy networks and chip design do have many points of convergence, and inspiration and experience can be drawn from chip technology.

Carbon reduction does not mean energy reduction

When the dual carbon target was first proposed, many people understood it as an environmental protection measure. In fact, the dual carbon target is far greater than the environmental protection target. The latter usually requires additional costs to achieve a better state, while the former allows people to use cheaper clean energy without restrictions. If carbon control is simply equated with restricting the production of high-carbon energy, it will inevitably lead to problems such as campaign-style carbon reduction, which will have a huge negative impact on human life and production. Although the causes of the European energy crisis and China's power outages in the past year are complex, the impact of radical carbon reduction measures cannot be avoided.

Looking back at the history of civilization, the progress of human society means more energy consumption. Primitive society used natural combustibles, agricultural society used firewood, early industrial society used coal, and mature industrial society used oil and natural gas. Every major leap forward in human society started with a change in energy form. The future zero-carbon society will also require newer energy forms to meet more energy needs. It is impossible to achieve this goal by simply limiting the production and use of high-carbon energy.

To achieve this goal, there are two practical paths. One is to accelerate the reshaping of the energy structure, reduce the proportion of high-carbon energy, and increase the proportion of low-carbon energy; the other is to improve energy utilization efficiency and achieve zero-carbon electricity.

Switching the energy source to electricity is the only way under the current technological state. Because only electricity has multiple sources, only electricity can be networked and precisely controlled, and only electricity can be directly produced using zero-carbon methods. However, it is more difficult than humans can imagine to achieve zero-carbon electricity. The European energy crisis, China's power outages, and the Texas blackout in the United States all prove that we still have a long way to go before energy freedom. On the road to energy freedom, technical challenges such as renewable energy generation, energy storage, and energy network digitization are waiting for humans to overcome.

After in-depth research on the entire energy digitalization path, Synopsys concluded that among these technical challenges, energy storage technology has the highest priority and the greatest impact on the entire energy network.

Energy storage: the key to a zero-carbon society

Many people are talking about the digitization of energy networks, and it is generally recognized that digitization is a prerequisite for achieving zero-carbon goals, because only digitization can achieve accurate control and efficient use of energy. However, in the current energy network, the application of digital technology is fragmented. Many Internet of Things technologies and intelligent control technologies are widely used in power generation, transmission and power consumption equipment, but the degree of digitization of the entire energy network is not high. The main bottleneck is that the current energy network lacks the important link of intelligent energy storage.

How important is energy storage to the digitalization of the entire energy network? It is equivalent to the status of data storage in chips. Data storage is as indispensable as data production, data transmission, and data consumption. In today's digital systems with chips as the core, the capacity, speed, and security of data storage are the prerequisites for the realization of any computing task. It is the high-capacity, high-speed, and highly reliable data storage that supports the current large and complex digital applications.

Traditional power grids have almost no energy storage capacity. A power grid that only produces, transmits and consumes electricity is like an analog chip that only produces, transmits and consumes data. It can only do some simple work like a handheld calculator and can hardly undertake any intelligent applications. Intelligent operation is an important feature of the next generation of energy networks. To achieve this goal, more advanced energy storage is needed. If the energy storage link is the shortcoming of the entire system, it will be difficult to carry out effective network intelligent optimization, and the digitalization of the energy network cannot be truly implemented.

Ge Qun said, "Energy storage is like the Ren and Du meridians of the digital energy network. Without the ability to store energy, even the most advanced energy consumption model cannot be used."

It is a misunderstanding to mention lithium batteries when talking about energy storage. As the power battery of the "last mile" of the energy network, lithium batteries are very competent. However, for large energy networks, lithium batteries are not the best energy storage method. They have high safety risks, short cycle life, poor environmental adaptability, and high energy storage costs.

Several energy storage technology experts told Caijing Eleven that energy storage technologies are very diverse. Mature technologies include pumped storage, compressed air storage, flywheel storage, lead-acid batteries, etc. Relatively mature technologies include lithium batteries, flow batteries, supercapacitors, etc. In addition, there are fuel cells, thermal storage, molten salt batteries, etc. Different energy storage technologies have different response times and application scenarios.

At present, the shortcoming of insufficient energy storage investment is being improved. For example, the energy storage product used to ensure power supply at the Beijing Winter Olympics is a type of liquid flow battery. The technical characteristics of this type of battery have better adaptability to grid-level energy storage and wind and solar energy grid connection.

In the future development of energy storage technology, the experience of chip development is worth learning from. In chip development, data storage is inherently diverse, with multi-level caches inside the chip, as well as memory, solid-state drives, and mechanical hard drives. At the same time, seemingly old technologies such as tapes still have strong vitality. Because data storage needs vary, each storage technology has its best application scenario. In the development of energy storage technology, this approach should also be followed. Energy storage is definitely not equal to lithium batteries, and even energy storage is not equal to batteries. Even ancient energy storage methods such as pumped storage can play a greater role in the process of digitalization of energy networks.

What conditions should energy storage technology in future energy networks meet? Ge Qun proposed four standards: extremely safe, easily accessible, digital, and large capacity.