Top Ten Trends in Digital Energy

China Energy Storage Network: The world is entering a period of rapid development of the digital economy. The energy transformation process has encountered new challenges, and the development model of the traditional energy industry has encountered bottlenecks in the era of economic digitalization. Although the energy consumption structure continues to optimize, the dual pressures of global climate change and environmental protection still exist for a long time. To build a clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient modern energy system, energy digital transformation is a must.

Recently, the "White Paper on the Top Ten Trends in Digital Energy" (hereinafter referred to as the "White Paper") jointly released by the Digital Energy Industry Think Tank pointed out that in electricity production, the use of traditional methods has problems such as low power generation efficiency and low operation and maintenance efficiency. Energy digitalization can effectively improve electricity production efficiency, operation and maintenance efficiency and energy efficiency, and help achieve the carbon neutrality goal.

Trend 1: Energy Digitalization

The White Paper points out that the traditional energy industry only focuses on the watt flow, and the "generation-transmission-distribution-storage-use" nodes are isolated from each other and difficult to coordinate, resulting in low power production efficiency and energy efficiency. In addition, there are a large number of "dumb devices" in the entire chain, which rely on manual maintenance and have low operation and maintenance efficiency. Energy digitization introduces digital technologies such as 5G, AI, and big data, and innovatively integrates power electronics technology with digital technology. It adds bit flow to the watt flow, manages watts with bits, and realizes the interconnection, digitization, and intelligent coordination of the entire chain, maximizing power production efficiency, operation and maintenance efficiency, and energy efficiency.

Trend 2: Green electricity is everywhere

The White Paper believes that green electricity is ubiquitous and includes the following dimensions:

First, electricity production will transform towards green and low-carbon. According to forecasts, the share of photovoltaic power generation will rapidly increase from 3% in 2020 to 24% in 2050, becoming the largest source of power generation.

Second, under the requirement of grid-connected stability, the integration of photovoltaic power generation and storage has become an inevitable trend. It is predicted that by 2025, the proportion of photovoltaic power generation and storage symbiosis in photovoltaic power stations will reach more than 60%, allowing photovoltaic power generation to move from "supplementary power" to "main power" and "high-quality power".

Third, photovoltaic power generation has entered the era of “grid parity”.

Fourth, distributed photovoltaics have entered thousands of industries and households, and the proportion of installed capacity has steadily increased. It is predicted that in 2025, distributed photovoltaics will account for more than 40% of the world's new installed capacity, about 47 gigawatts per year.

Fifth, with the widespread application of distributed photovoltaics, active safety has become an industry consensus. Under traditional solutions, photovoltaic systems may cause loose joints and aging cables due to long-term use, which may lead to arcing. If not handled in time, it is easy to cause fire risks and pose hidden dangers to building and personal safety. Therefore, active safety has become a key factor in the application of distributed photovoltaics.

Sixth, the rapid development of the digital world and the surge in the number of data centers and sites will bring higher energy consumption challenges. According to forecasts, global data center energy consumption will rapidly increase from 670 billion kWh in 2020 to 950 billion kWh in 2025, accounting for about 3% of the world's total electricity consumption; global site energy consumption will rapidly increase from 203 billion kWh in 2020 to 660 billion kWh in 2025, accounting for about 2% of the world's total electricity consumption.

Seventh, green electricity will help the ICT industry become more low-carbon, and zero-carbon networks and zero-carbon data centers will be realized in the future. The world's leading operators have successively proposed zero-carbon network strategies and will deploy photovoltaics on a large scale in typical ICT scenarios such as sites, computer rooms, and data centers.

Trend 3: Full-link efficiency

The White Paper points out that with the development of power electronics technology, as well as the upgrade of power devices, topologies and control algorithms, power supply components have achieved extreme efficiency. Currently, the industry's highest inverter conversion efficiency has reached 99%, the highest UPS module efficiency has reached 97.5%, the highest PSU rectifier module efficiency has reached 98%, and the highest electric vehicle charging module efficiency has reached 96.5%. The efficiency improvement at the module level has limited room for improving the efficiency at the system level. In order to improve system efficiency, it is necessary to upgrade the full-link architecture of "generation-transmission-distribution-storage-use".

Trend 4: AI support

The White Paper points out that in the traditional model, power production, equipment operation and maintenance, and energy use are highly dependent on expert experience and manual labor, which is inefficient. Moving from the traditional expert experience and manual model to the AI ​​model will greatly improve power production efficiency, operation and maintenance efficiency, and energy efficiency, help increase operational efficiency, and enhance safety assurance.

For example, traditional 100-megawatt photovoltaic power stations usually require 20 people to be on duty for a long time, and manual power outages and maintenance are required when a fault occurs, which is inefficient and costly to operate. However, the intelligent IV diagnosis that integrates AI algorithms can achieve one-click remote 100% component health checks during daily inspections, accurately identify string fault types, locate faulty strings, and provide repair suggestions, thereby improving operation and maintenance efficiency and reducing power losses.

Trend 5: Fusion and Minimalism

The White Paper points out that traditional energy infrastructure has problems such as multiple systems, large equipment volume, and complex engineering, resulting in long construction periods and high construction and operation and maintenance costs. Through minimalist deployment such as architecture fusion, form fusion, and engineering productization, energy infrastructure can be implemented with smaller footprint, faster deployment, lower rent, simpler operation and maintenance, and lower costs.

Trend 6: Energy Network Autonomous Driving

Realizing autonomous driving in the energy grid is an urgent need for enterprises.

The White Paper points out that traditional energy equipment maintenance mostly relies on manual labor, which requires a lot of repetitive and complex operations and has high labor costs. Autonomous driving energy networks can not only replace manual labor, but also improve prediction and prevention capabilities based on massive data, and provide differentiated services based on data-driven.

For example, in data centers, AI robots can be used to automatically inspect, identify images, sounds and smells, provide temperature cloud maps, manage assets, report information in real time, and automatically generate inspection reports, bringing data center inspections into the "unmanned" era. In photovoltaic power stations, the intelligent photovoltaic IV diagnostic solution using AI technology can complete a full scan of a 100-megawatt photovoltaic power station in 2 minutes, and generate a report online in 10 minutes, realizing "unmanned" operation and maintenance and diagnosis of photovoltaic power stations.

Trend 7: Integrated Smart Energy

Traditional energy systems will move towards integrated smart energy systems, promote green and low-carbon economic transformation and sustainable development, assist in building a "zero-carbon country", and accelerate the achievement of carbon neutrality goals.

The White Paper points out that in the traditional energy construction mode, the source-grid-load-storage is built independently, lacking unified management and coordination, resulting in low energy efficiency and high energy costs. Integrated smart energy uses digital technology to evolve the energy generation, transmission, distribution, and power consumption from the traditional chimney-style independent system architecture and island-style management to a unified architecture, unified management, and comprehensive application, achieving the overall planning, coordination, and optimization of the entire chain, greatly improving energy utilization efficiency and reducing energy costs.

Trend 8: Intelligent Energy Storage System

Comprehensive lithium electrification is becoming the preferred energy storage option in all walks of life. Ordinary lithium batteries will evolve into intelligent energy storage systems to maximize the value of energy storage.

The White Paper points out that intelligent energy storage systems use technologies such as AI and big data to achieve self-organizing networks and cloud-based intelligent management of energy storage systems. Through AI and big data, more accurate electrochemical models are used to improve the accuracy of energy storage management. At the same time, the state, life and risk of the energy storage system can be predicted to ensure the reliable operation and safety of the system. Secondly, the application scenarios of intelligent energy storage systems are more abundant, such as coordinating with the power grid to achieve frequency and peak regulation; coordinating with businesses to maximize the efficiency of peak-shifting operations. At present, in Zhejiang, my country, the AI ​​self-peak shifting of intelligent energy storage systems saves nearly 17% of electricity costs.