Breakthroughs in energy storage technology are a booster for the leapfrog development of new energy

Under the background of carbon peak and carbon neutrality, the transformation of energy structure to green and low-carbon has become a general trend, which will promote the leapfrog development of renewable energy industries represented by wind power and photovoltaic power generation. However, renewable energy power generation generally has bottleneck problems such as intermittency and volatility, which requires energy storage to smooth the load and ensure the safe and stable operation of the power grid.

In the future new power system, energy storage will be an indispensable part, providing strong support for the large-scale development, safe grid connection and high-proportion consumption of renewable energy, which also brings important development opportunities for the development of the energy storage industry. The application of energy storage technology will run through various application scenarios such as power generation, transmission and distribution, and power consumption of the power system.

On the power generation side, energy storage is mainly used to improve the grid connection capacity of renewable energy and reduce the phenomenon of abandoned solar and wind power. On the grid side, energy storage mainly participates in the peak and frequency regulation of the power system to alleviate grid congestion. On the user side, energy storage mainly plays the role of self-generation and self-use, as well as peak shaving and valley filling. The rising demand for grid regulation and energy security is driving the rapid growth of the energy storage industry.

The energy storage industry will usher in an explosive period

The sudden rise of the energy storage track is also related to the support at the policy level. The country has introduced a number of policies to promote the development of the energy storage market. In March 2022, the "14th Five-Year Plan for Modern Energy System" jointly issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration clearly pointed out that it is necessary to accelerate the large-scale application of new energy storage technologies, vigorously promote the development of power supply-side energy storage, reasonably allocate energy storage scale, optimize the layout of grid-side energy storage, give play to the multiple roles of energy storage in absorbing new energy, shaving peaks and filling valleys, enhancing grid stability and emergency power supply, actively support the diversified development of user-side energy storage, and broaden the application scenarios of energy storage.

With the introduction of the top-level design, new energy storage systems are being deployed across the country at an accelerated pace. Many provinces have issued policies on new energy storage, making the construction of energy storage a prerequisite for new energy grid connection or approval.

Driven by both policies and markets, the energy storage industry has entered a period of rapid growth. It is estimated that by 2025, the planned new energy storage installed capacity will exceed 40 GW, of which the market size of BMS (battery management system), an important component of energy storage system, will reach 17.8 billion yuan.

Avnet helps build safe and reliable energy storage systems

The key to the development of energy storage technology lies in the advancement of BMS (battery management system) technology. Since energy storage systems need to have high reliability and long-term safe and stable operation, this places higher requirements on BMS.

The first is the battery balancing management capability. Many industry applications require that the service life of the energy storage system can reach 15 to 20 years, which means that the BMS must have a strong battery balancing management capability, so the energy storage system generally requires the use of active balancing technology. The second is a sound system abnormality handling mechanism. For example, in terms of thermal aging management and fault alarm processing, the BMS needs to be able to respond quickly. The third is big data processing and storage capabilities. The energy storage system is relatively large in scale and requires massive amounts of data to be processed, stored and managed. The fourth is a high-precision SoC. The SoC accuracy must be less than 2%, which is also one of the future development trends of the energy storage system. In addition, there are also communication reliability and stability.

These requirements are challenges on one hand, but also bring rare development opportunities to all companies that have made early arrangements, including Avnet, which has been deeply involved in this field for a long time. As a leading global distributor and technology solution provider, Avnet has accumulated nearly ten years of cases and solutions in BMS, and has mastered core technologies in battery balancing, thermal management, system communication, fault protection and processing. It is a certified BMS core solution agent for NXP, Infineon and STMicroelectronics, and is good at solving key BMS technical problems for customers.

At the same time, Avnet's engineering team has experience in productizing energy storage systems, and has joined forces with more high-quality manufacturers of sensors, contactors, relays, connectors, and protection circuits to solve the safety and reliability issues of the overall solution. At present, Avnet's BMS solutions cover energy storage on the power generation side and distributed diversified methods, ranging from megawatts to 10kW-level application scenarios. In the face of the vigorous development of the energy storage industry, Avnet will increase R&D, technical support, and market investment in the energy storage field, and expand its leading advantages to serve more customers.

Looking into the future, energy storage BMS will move towards cloud computing and develop the demand for cloud BMS. Users can place complex computing tasks in the cloud and use the technology of the big data cloud platform to solve the data and algorithm processing problems of BMS. Secondly, AI autonomous learning technology will also be introduced into BMS to continuously improve the accuracy of SoC. From the perspective of the connection architecture of the wiring harness, the wireless transmission architecture can reduce wiring, save space and further reduce costs. It will have good development prospects in the field of energy storage BMS, but to be applied to actual scenarios, it still requires a certain amount of technical accumulation.