A milestone in the practice of these technologies was the Red Sea project in Saudi Arabia, in which Huawei as one of the main partners provided a complete set of solutions including an intelligent PV controller, a Lithium Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) . The project uses 400 MW of PV and 1.3 GWh ESS to support an electrical grid that replaces conventional diesel generators and provides clean and sustainable energy for one million people, creating the world’s first city powered by 100% renewable energy. Provides stable energy.
High power and reliability of equipment in photovoltaic plants will be the trend. Take photovoltaic inverters for example; Nowadays, the DC voltage of the inverter has been increased from 1100V to 1500V. With the use of new materials such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), as well as the full integration of digital, power electronics and thermal management technologies, it is estimated that the power density of inverters will increase by approximately 50% over the next five years. and high reliability can be maintained.
The 2.2 GW PV plant in Qinghai, China is located 3,100 meters above sea level and houses 9,216 Huawei smart PV controllers (inverters) that work robustly in this harsh environment. The total availability hours of Huawei inverters has exceeded 20 million hours and the availability has reached 99.999%.
Trend 3: Module Level Power Electronics (MLPE)
Driven by industry policies and technological advances, distributed photovoltaics have seen vigorous development in recent years. We are facing the challenges of optimizing the utilization of rooftop resources, ensuring high energy performance and ensuring the safety of the PV+ESS system. Therefore, more sophisticated management is a must.
In a PV system, module level power electronics (MLPE) refers to power electronic equipment that can perform sophisticated control over one or more PV modules, including microinverters, power optimizers, and disconnectors. MLPE brings unique values such as module-level power generation, control and safe shutdown. As PV systems become more secure and intelligent, the penetration rate of MLPE in the distributed PV market is expected to reach 20-30% by 2027.
Trend 4: String Energy Storage
Compared with traditional centralized ESS solutions, Smart String ESS solution adopts distributed architecture and modular design. It uses innovative technologies and intelligent digital management to optimize power at the battery pack level and control power at the rack level. This results in greater discharge energy, optimal investment, easier operation and maintenance, as well as safety and reliability throughout the ESS’s life cycle.
In 2022, for frequency regulation and rotating standby purposes in the 200MW/200MWh ESS project in Singapore, the largest BESS project in Southeast Asia, the Smart String ESS adopts sophisticated charging and discharging management to achieve continuous power output over long periods of time implemented. Ensure the benefits of time and frequency regulation. In addition, the SOC automatic calibration function at the battery pack level reduces labor costs and significantly improves O&M efficiency.
Trend 5: Sophisticated Management at the Cellular Level
Like PV systems moving towards MLPE, Lithium BeS will be developed towards a smaller management scale. Only sophisticated management at the battery cell level can optimally address the issues of efficiency and safety. At present, traditional battery management systems (BMS) can only summarize and analyze limited data, and it is almost impossible to detect faults at an early stage and generate warnings. Therefore, the BMS needs to be more sensitive, intelligent and predictive as well. It relies on the collection, calculation and processing of large amounts of data and artificial intelligence techniques to find and forecast the optimal operating mode.
Trend 6: PV+ESS+Grid Integration
On the power generation side, we are seeing more and more PV+ESS clean energy base building practices that supply power to load centers via UHV power transmission lines. On the energy consumption side, virtual power plants (VPPs) are becoming increasingly popular in many countries. VPPs combine distributed PV, ESS and controllable loads on a large scale, and implement flexible scheduling for power generation units and storage units to achieve peak clipping, etc.
