Electricity market needs sustainable business development model

Experts from the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the National Energy Administration, the National Grid, China Southern Power Grid and universities at the 2014 International Smart Grid Action Network (ISGAN) Shanghai International Symposium and the 3rd China Smart Grid Industry Development Summit Forum As well as energy officials from 25 member countries of ISGAN, they conducted in-depth discussions on issues such as policies, technologies, and cases of smart grid development and promotion and implementation of smart grids.

“Strict haze and other environmental problems and the vigorous development of renewable energy require us to speed up the transformation of energy and power grids.” Liu Dong, director of the Smart Energy Utilization Institute of the National Energy Smart Grid (Shanghai) R&D Center, interviewed by reporters Said that actively promoting the construction of smart grids is undoubtedly a solution to the deep-seated problems in China's energy development, and fundamentally eased the strategic measures for China's coal and electricity operation tensions.

Long distance transmission with Chinese characteristics

More than 70% of coal, hydropower, wind energy, and solar energy resources in China are concentrated in the western and northern regions, while energy load centers are mainly distributed in the eastern and central regions. The uneven distribution of energy resources and productivity has made it difficult for China to rely on traditional power grids to meet the energy needs of the eastern and central regions.

In order to cope with the ever-increasing energy demand in China's economic and social development, solve the imbalance in the geographical distribution of energy resources and electricity demand, meet the requirements of the low-carbon socio-economic development model for the power system, and accelerate the development of smart grids is imminent. As a result, the State Grid Corporation of China released the “Strong Smart Grid” development plan in May 2009.

The reporter learned that according to the plan, the development of “Strong Smart Grid” is divided into three phases: 2009-2010 is a pilot phase for planning, focusing on the development of strong smart grid development planning, setting technical standards and management specifications, and conducting key technology research and development and equipment development And the pilot work for all links; 2011-2015 will be a comprehensive construction phase to accelerate the construction of UHV power grids and distribution networks for urban and rural areas; and a unified “strong and smart grid” will be built in 2016-2020.

In July 2013, the State Council Executive Meeting focused on “strengthening the construction of urban distribution networks and promoting the intelligentization of power grids” when it focused on research and deployment of strengthening urban infrastructure. State Grid Corporation of China stated that it will invest 500 billion yuan in the “12th Five-Year Plan” period to build a “three horizontal and three vertical” exchange UHV backbone grid and 13 long-distance direct-current power transmission projects connecting large-scale energy bases and major load centers. Build a world-class "Strong Smart Grid." In addition, the development plan of China Southern Power Grid proposes to promote the construction of smart grids, and by 2020, the automatic coverage of urban distribution networks will reach 80%.

Supportive policies are frequent and the smart grid industry continues to heat up. It is understood that in the next eight years, the national grid investment will reach 3 trillion yuan, of which the UHV grid will occupy 950 billion yuan. The large market capacity means that the certainty of continuous high growth of the smart grid is very strong, obviously higher than the market average. "The market value brought by the smart grid is no less than the wave of information." Liu Dong said.

Michelangele Nigris, chairman of ISGAN Executive Committee, said in an interview with reporters: “In China, smart grid research focuses on transmission, especially long-distance transmission. This requires more advanced technology, so we heard more about this meeting. High-voltage AC and DC transmission networks are not just point-to-point networks. Multi-terminal DC is also a hot research area in Europe, but it has not yet been widely used.”

Regarding the challenges posed by long-distance transmission, Xue Yusheng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and honorary president of the State Grid Corporation of Electric Power Research Institute, said in an interview: “China’s renewable energy resources and fossil energy resources are concentrated in the west of the consumer centers. In northern regions, China Power Grid not only has to accept unconditional distributed renewable energy access, supports electric vehicle charging and replacement networks, but also assumes the responsibility of coordinating energy resources and transporting large amounts of clean and long-distance energy over a wide area, and is uncertain on a large scale. The pressure on power balance, safety and stability caused by intermittent intermittent power generation is increasing. Therefore, State Grid Corporation of China proposed to build a 'strong smart grid'."

Strengthen top-level design to solve technical and non-technical issues

“China has mastered advanced power system protection and control technologies, made important breakthroughs in the defense technology of power outages that caused major power outages, established multi-channel coordination of space-time coordination, and has maintained a good reliability record for a long time,” said Xue Yusheng.

“But the current power system analysis is for a given boundary condition without considering the impact of the external environment.” Xue Yusheng said that although the security and stability defense system has covered 4/5 of the country's provincial-level or above power grids, it is dealing with extreme externalities. There are still deficiencies in disasters, and lack of multiple lines of defense in the information system itself make it difficult to cope with the complex power outages caused by extreme disasters. The scope of wide-area information collection has been expanded from the interior of the power system to the natural environment, the position of the natural disaster prevention of the power system has been advanced, and the pre-planned security defense has been promoted to active defense. These should be the problems that need to be solved at present.

“At the seminar, we further discussed the future academic direction of the smart grid, such as the integration of power system needs with population, geographical environment, and social factors. In order to solve the blackouts caused by natural disasters, environmental safety and energy must be considered. Market security, physical security.” Xue Yusheng said that for the Chinese energy industry, the concept of defense is endless and the disaster is always a challenge to humanity.

"We urgently need a top-level design to solve the problem of merging between technology and non-technology. There is still a lot of work to be done to gradually improve the defense system. We need to do a good job of risk management plans, arrange various defense measures, and expand the general sense. On the concept of 'three lines of defense' to deal with extreme disasters." Xue Yusheng explained, "For example, in responding to natural disasters, if we can expand the information acquisition beyond the power system and move it forward into the meteorological field, it is possible to predict freezing rain. The trend of typhoons, typhoons and lightning strikes will allow more time to prepare plans, dispatch disaster relief supplies and deploy emergency repair teams."

Jiang Xiuchen, director of the National Energy Smart Grid (Shanghai) R&D Center, said that the National Energy Smart Grid (Shanghai) R&D Center has five fields: new energy access, smart transmission and distribution, intelligent power distribution, power system planning, and power system operation. Rich research accumulation, R&D achievements 1.5 MW - 3.6 MW Full power converters, Transmission lines, Substation equipment status assessment, Line and distribution network fault location, Increased transmission capacity, Second-generation high-temperature superconducting tape, Smart distributed Technologies such as feeder automation and active distribution networks have been widely recognized.

“We need a sustainable business development model that will transform new energy demonstration projects into sustainable industries. The electricity market needs to be reformed both in power generation and in electricity sales.” Liu Dong said, “If we can pass the national grid, the South The power grid and some related companies, together with flexible market mechanisms and capital investment, have built a new business model. It is believed that many excellent energy companies will take this opportunity to grow bigger and smaller."

"Users are the ultimate motivators and beneficiaries of smart grid development. If users cannot actively participate in the construction of smart grids, the future development of smart grids will be very difficult," said Liu Dong.

A variety of energy storage technology development to find a breakthrough

Xue Yusheng stated that although various countries have accelerated the research and construction of energy storage and smart transmission and distribution systems, the application of the engineering field is still in the initial stages of the laboratory and demonstration projects. These demonstration projects show new ways of promoting renewable energy use, smoothing loads, and improving energy efficiency.

"Short-term high-power energy storage can use flywheel energy storage, compressed air energy storage and other means, such as for transient stability or low-frequency oscillation control. But a long period of large-scale power storage is also placed in chemical energy storage. Xue Yusheng told reporters that there is still a long way to go before the real implementation of large-scale applications.

“The application of electric energy storage requires on the one hand high conversion efficiency and high energy density per unit. On the other hand, it also needs to consider its safety and adaptability to the access to the power grid. This puts forward direct requirements on materials science,” said Liu Dong. Energy storage is an indispensable link in the construction and implementation of smart grids. With the advancement of smart grid construction in China, power storage technology is also moving toward higher efficiency, higher energy density, and lower cost.