In 2017, the Chinese Academy of Sciences launched a rural energy revolution. Lankao, a typical large agricultural county situated in the Yellow River Basin, was the first county to take part in this revolution. Lankao County lacks fossil energy, but has rich energy resources such as wind, solar, and geothermal, which provides a good foundation for pushing forward renewable energy power generation.
However, the yield from renewable energy is as variable as the weather and the natural environment. The peak and valley demands of electricity are uncertain. Worse, the output of renewable energy typically does not match electricity demands, for example, wind turbines tend to generate more power in the deep of night, when less electricity is needed. These problems make it a worldwide challenge to make renewable energy consumption stable and safe and to leverage renewable energy for power generation for counties at scale. Traditional grids are not able to adapt to renewable energy power generation. A large amount of wind and solar energy is wasted.
To maximize the utilization of renewable energy for electric power and make Lankao able to fully rely on renewable energy, in 2020, Lankao County Power Supply Company and State Grid Henan Electric Power Company partnered with Huawei Cloud to establish an energy Internet platform. Using tech advances like cloud computing, IoT, and big data, the platform can effectively monitor, predict, adjust, and control power usage. They have explored an efficient, viable way forward for cloud-based renewable energy development around the world.
To establish the energy Internet platform, they needed to connect all of the power generation, grid, load, and storage facilities. In this process, it was a big challenge to aggregate and maximize the value of the data from distributed facilities for renewable energy power generation.
Unlike traditional centralized thermal power generation facilities, a large number of distributed renewable energy power generation facilities, such as wind turbines and solar panels (including rooftop panels), are often scattered about, deployed in many different places. This made data aggregation challenging.
In addition, the power generation at some facilities fluctuates significantly. Precise, real-time predictions for power generation at these facilities require very low latency for data collection, down to just milliseconds.
In terms of data access and collection, State Grid Henan Electric Power Company leveraged the DaaS and IoT capabilities provided by Huawei Cloud Stack to establish a next-generation digital system. The system also used the cloud-edge synergy provided by Huawei Cloud Stack to enable minute-level data collection and data sharing at the sensing, platform, and application layers, with an average latency of less than 100 ms.
When a traditional power load prediction model is used, power generation and usage data is imported to a lake every a few hours, terabytes of data needs to be processed, and analysis takes days. As a result, the prediction model usually needs 1 to 2 hours to complete a prediction, and the prediction for the amount of power generated from clean energy is not very accurate, so more thermal power is typically required. With the Huawei Cloud Stack intelligent data lake, power load data can be imported to the lake in seconds, and megabytes of incremental data can be updated, calculated, and analyzed in seconds. A more refined load prediction model, one that only needs a few minutes, is available for accurately predicting the amount of power generated from clean energy, which makes it easier to control how much thermal power is required.
State Grid Henan Electric Power Company used the intelligent data lake solution from Huawei Cloud Stack to establish a generation-grid-load-storage collaboration and control platform. The platform provides optimization policies for the dispatch of renewable energy and accurately predicts how much power can be generated from clean energy. The accuracy of short-term predictions for the output of renewable energy has reached 96.5%, far beyond international standards.
Xing Ziya, a senior engineer and director of Construction and Application Office, Digital Work Department of State Grid Henan Electric Power Company, said: "The energy Internet platform of Lankao County has increased the proportion of power generated by renewable energy resources in Lankao from 21% to 97.7%. They can now provide power from renewable energy sources 24/5. This means they have achieved self-sufficiency with renewable energy."
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