At present, the digital economy characterized by information technologies such as 5G, big data, AI and artificial intelligence has swept the world, profoundly changing the production and lifestyle of human beings and becoming a new kinetic energy and new direction of global economic development.
As an important material basis for the survival and development of human society, energy plays an important role in the digital economy. The United Nations report on digital economy in 2019 shows that energy infrastructure will become an important foundation of digital economy to ensure the efficient and reliable operation of digital technology.
With the rapid development of the digital economy, the digital transformation of the energy industry has also entered the fast lane. Energy digitalization is regarded as an important driving force to realize the transformation and upgrading of the traditional energy industry and revitalize it, which is expected to reshape the global energy development trend.
However, while the digital transformation of energy helps the world’s energy pattern to be profoundly adjusted and the energy structure to be continuously optimized, the challenges and development bottlenecks it faces cannot be ignored.
How to use digital technology to break industry boundaries and lead the energy industry to transform into low-carbon, electrification, digitalization and intelligence? How to improve energy efficiency and reduce maintenance costs? How to seize the new "foundation" and reshape the power generation structure, so that clean energy power generation can rise from supplementary energy to main energy?
On September 24th, during the period of Huawei Connect 2020, Zhou Taoyuan, President of Huawei Digital Energy Product Line, Zhou Liang, Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Digital Energy Product Line, and Peng Jianhua, President of Huawei Site Energy Field, expounded how Huawei Digital Energy will break the bottleneck restricting the digital transformation of energy one by one around the theme of "leading energy digitalization and building a green and intelligent world".
Huawei is fully connected to the 2020 media round-table interview site.
Huawei’s determination
Perhaps the renaming of Huawei Digital Energy can better reflect its determination to break down industry barriers and provide green power for the smart world.
Zhou Taoyuan, president of Huawei’s digital energy product line, said in an interview that "Huawei’s network energy was officially renamed Huawei Digital Energy in May this year", which is the symbolic signal of Huawei’s deep cut into the digital energy market.
Behind Huawei’s deep penetration into the digital energy market is its deep understanding of energy digitalization.
While digital technology is deeply integrated with all walks of life, its own development also needs strong energy base to support it, so as to eliminate the energy gap in the digital world, accelerate the deployment process of digital infrastructure, realize the sustainable development of the digital world, and let more people enjoy the convenience and beauty brought by the digital world.
"Huawei wants to be the energy base of the digital world, organically combine power electronics technology, ICT technology, artificial intelligence technology, big data and cloud, manage watts by bits, lead the digital transformation of energy, and make energy extremely simple, green, efficient, intelligent and reliable, thus helping clean energy become the main energy and building a green and intelligent world. This is Huawei’s goal in the energy field." Zhou Taoyuan said.
A passage from the official website of Huawei Digital Energy not only explains the company’s mission and value, but also specifically explains the concept of "energy base" at the product level:
The intelligent world of the Internet of Everything is coming. Facing the challenges of the new era, Huawei Digital Energy can provide energy solutions that fully meet the application scenarios of the ICT industry, including all-scene intelligent sites from fixed network to wireless and intelligent data centers from edge to cloud. It helps telecom and tower operators achieve green, efficient, safe, reliable and intelligent business, and supports the smooth evolution of ICT networks to 5G and all-cloud.
At the same time, Zhou Taoyuan further added, "For many years, Huawei has been hoping to use communication and connection technologies to make energy into a network that can be correlated and managed. With the advent of the digital economy, it is necessary to superimpose advanced technologies such as big data, AI, 5G, cloud and artificial intelligence to solve application problems such as high energy consumption, low energy efficiency and operation and maintenance. It is necessary to introduce it into the energy industry through more digital means, and truly realize the conversion, storage and control and support of digital technology to electric energy. Therefore, Huawei Network Energy officially changed its name to Huawei Digital Energy ".
Digital Energy "Inverter" Smart Photovoltaic
In fact, before the name change, Huawei Digital Energy has been leading the digital transformation of energy. Among them, the most representative is its successful application in smart photovoltaic power plants.
"Smart photovoltaic is the application of integrating ICT technology with photovoltaic, which has brought the ultimate improvement in efficiency to the industry." Liang Zhou, chief marketing official of Huawei’s digital energy product line, said, "Huawei is the first enterprise in the industry to introduce AI technology into photovoltaics. Huawei’s AI technology and experience can be reused in the photovoltaic field. This innate cross-border innovation technology and resources are not available to peers. "
Fang Liangzhou’s speech film shows that the AI applications of Huawei digital energy in photovoltaic industry include intelligent SDS, intelligent IV, intelligent grid connection, intelligent AFCI, fast turn-off technology and intelligent image recognition.
Among them, intelligent IV diagnosis is a successful application of AI technology in intelligent photovoltaic power station, which subverts the traditional manual inspection method. The traditional way is to manually go to the station for inspection, take the equipment and check it by sampling, which is like looking for a needle in a haystack and has great uncertainty.
Huawei intelligent IV diagnosis can remotely confirm the fault location and type of photovoltaic string by using the string current and voltage data collected by the string inverter combined with big data mining and AI identification algorithm.
Through one-click scanning, the 100MW power station can automatically generate fault diagnosis reports of all the strings within 15 minutes. The operation and maintenance time has changed from the original month to the minute.
In fact, when Huawei first entered the photovoltaic field, it took the series inverter as the starting point. The photovoltaic inverter market is mainly divided into two technical routes: centralized inverter and series inverter. At that time, the industry generally believed that centralized inverters were suitable for large-scale ground power stations, and series inverters were more suitable for distributed power stations.
When the centralized inverter is the absolute mainstream of the market, Huawei is different from its peers in the industry in introducing series inverters. However, Huawei’s series inverters have finally withstood the test of the market.
Fang Liangzhou believes that "the multi-channel MPPT function of series inverter is not affected by module differences and shading between series inverters, which minimizes the mismatch of photovoltaic modules, thus bringing higher power generation. When the abandonment failure occurs, the affected loss is lower, and the life cycle maintenance cost is lower, which objectively increases the power generation and reduces the maintenance cost. "
According to incomplete statistics, more and more large photovoltaic power plants have begun to use series inverters. In the bidding of the five major power generation groups, more than 80% of them use series inverters, and series inverters have become the mainstream of the market.
Digital energy empowers "new infrastructure"
Huawei’s leading role in the digital transformation of energy is also reflected in its strong green and intelligent Internet data center.
As we all know, this year, the National People’s Congress and the National People’s Congress wrote the new infrastructure construction into the "Government Work Report" for the first time, which pressed the "fast forward button" for the transformation of China’s digital economy. No matter in the seven directions of "new infrastructure" defined by CCTV or the main areas announced by the National Development and Reform Commission, the data center is undoubtedly one of the protagonists.
However, the acceleration of "new infrastructure" has injected momentum into the development of China’s digital economy, but it is also accompanied by many challenges such as long construction period, high energy consumption, difficult operation and maintenance, safety and reliability.
How to deal with these challenges? The digitization and intelligent upgrade of the data center itself has become the key. Fang Liangzhou said, "Huawei, which has been deeply involved in the field of ICT for many years and has strong technical advantages and profound experience in the fields of 5G, Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, has proved the green power injected by digital energy into the’ new infrastructure’ with its digital transformation solutions specially launched for the’ new infrastructure’ and practical cases that have successfully landed."
Specifically, Huawei’s next-generation data center adopts a fully modular design idea, which greatly shortens the construction period while fully meeting the differentiated needs and can be delivered within 6 months; Based on AHU and icooling technology, the PUE value can be reduced by 0.08-0.15; Through the power module and lithium battery, the floor space is reduced by 40% and the out-of-cabinet rate is increased by 10%; Use DCIM and 3i (iPower, iCooling, iManager) to reduce operation and maintenance costs and manual misoperation. Thus, "let time be visible, let funds be used rationally, and let IRR improve quickly"
Huawei has also made great achievements in the construction of ——5G base stations, another important part of the "new infrastructure".
"In the past, the digitalization of site energy was not enough. Many operators were not sure about the actual energy consumption, power reserve, inaccurate battery allocation, and whether the safety and reliability were guaranteed. Therefore, it is imperative to eliminate the digital site energy gap while accelerating the digital transformation of the industry," said Peng Jianhua, president of Huawei’s site energy field. "Huawei launched a 5G complete solution iSitePower based on industry sites. From the components to the site to the whole network, we know and have products and technologies. Through the integration of power electronics, AI and other technologies and the cooperation of industries, we can achieve’ 5G without electricity charges’.
In a word, Huawei is redefining the energy infrastructure with digital technology, vigorously developing the digital energy industry, focusing on smart photovoltaics, data centers, site energy and many other fields, providing minimalist, green, intelligent and safe solutions to help the high-quality construction of "new infrastructure".
