Intelligent distribution – looking towards an Internet of Energy
Credit: Huawei – 26th World Energy Congress
Huawei has released its Intelligent Distribution Solution with edge computation at its heart to orchestrate the automation and digitalisation of the increasingly complex power grids.
The energy transition is bringing new challenges to power utilities, particularly on the distribution side with the pressures for decentralising energy systems and decarbonising sectors such as transport and industry.
Jason Li, President of Global Marketing & Solutions, Huawei Electric Power Digitalization Business Unit, points to China as an example of the pace and scale of such changes underway with the installed capacity of renewables set to double from 760GW in 2022 to 1,530GW in 2025.
Within that distributed PV is almost doubling from 158GW to 298GW.
On the load side, within the same period, the number of EVs is set to increase from 13 million to 45 million by 2025 accompanied by an almost four-fold increase in the number of charging piles from 5.2 million to 22.5 million.
“It’s a big leapfrog development of the new energy,” says Li, pointing to the need for automation and control as the basis for the company’s approach to its solution development.
“Automatic control technology alone cannot solve the problem … we need to complement the advantages of digital technologies such as cloud and big data.
“We need to adopt AI technologies to shift to an architecture supporting digitalisation that integrates multiple technologies and enables the professionals to better tackle industry challenges.”
Interesting read:
Collaboration key to advancing AI in energy sector say WEC panelists
Intelligent Distribution Solution
Drawing on the concept of a ‘pipe’ as a conveyor, Huawei’s Intelligent Distribution Solution is based on a cloud-pipe-edge-pipe-device architecture.
The connectivity pipe between the cloud infrastructure and edge computing unit can be public or private and fibre or wireless. The pipe between the edge computing unit and the terminal devices, the ‘last mile’, is high-speed power line carrier communication (HPLC) to deliver the low latency and high-reliability requirements for real-time monitoring and the wide coverage necessary in a typical transformer district.
Sitting at the centre of the architecture, Huawei’s edge computing unit is a device a little larger than an average smart meter that would be deployed typically in distribution transformer districts, playing an all-in-one role as a DCU for meters, a TTU for the transformer, an IOT gateway for sensors, PV stations and charging piles.
“We link the edge computing unit to a PC or a smartphone as it is a device that sits at the edge connected to the power grid that collects information and processes it,” explains Edwin Diender, Chief Innovation Officer, Huawei Electric Power Digitalization BU.
“It’s a platform-based hardware and app-based software device that helps the power company to realize more efficient and lean management in daily operations.”
The apps are user-developed according to their specific use case requirements – and open the way for leasing to other users – with likely examples including use cases such as power quality detection, PV access or EV charging pile management.
Diender notes that the utility’s cloud infrastructure, where other platforms and systems are located, such as the IoT management, MessageFlow platforms, head end system, distribution management or billing systems, is recommended to be a private rather than a public cloud to protect the integrity of its services and to meet privacy and other data protection requirements.
That private cloud then provides a unified foundation with five enablements, i.e. R&D enablement, application enablement, data enablement, AI enablement and integration enablement, and four synergies: application synergy, data synergy, AI synergy and O&M synergy.
He also notes that the solution has been developed as an open system to ensure interoperability with different devices and communications systems.
You might be interested in:
Building a future-oriented communication foundation for digital power distribution
Intelligent Distribution Solution outcomes
A key foundation of the Intelligent Distribution Solution was its development and ongoing evolution with partners in China and other countries including Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Among the outcomes in China for example, in a deployment in the Shaanxi province in collaboration with the State Grid Shaanxi Electric Power Co. Ltd, the solution has been found to revolutionise the management of over 100,000 distribution transformer districts, reducing outage durations and improving the power supply reliability rate.
Fault detection has been enabled within 1 minute, response within 3 minutes, and resolution within 15 minutes.
The solution has also enabled seamless integration of over 50,000 residential PV sites and more than 1,000 large-scale 10kV PV sites have achieved 100% access and consumption.
Currently, more than 140,000 ECUs have been installed in Shaanxi and 28 applications have been developed with more than 700,000 downloads.
“The solution delivers comprehensive and accurate power distribution network sensing, lean and refined management, timely and proactive customer service, and simpler and more efficient work for our employees,” says Zhang Genzhou, CIO of State Grid Shaanxi.
Huawei itself suggests that a typical return on investment on the solution based on the tests and deployments to date is between one and two years, and in the best cases, can be less than a year.
Internet of Energy
While digitalisation is increasingly embedded in the power system, much more must be done to achieve its full potential.
Li describes the edge computing unit as a “smart brain”, effectively linking the physical infrastructure to the digital world and ultimately what could become a worldwide web of energy.
Expanding the analogy with a smartphone he explains: “The app store and cloud orchestration implement flexible deployment of various services at the edge.
“Then different policies can be defined within each transformer district for flexible district autonomy, with the transformer district managers becoming ‘CEOs’ with their creativity stimulated.”
At the same time with powerline communication and the opportunity with HPLC to bring fibre to the home, either in partnership with mobile communication providers or even by the power company itself in some jurisdictions, the foundation for a worldwide web of energy is being laid with the energy provider transforming to an energy services provider.
“The latest version of HPLC can deliver 99.9% communication reliability, supporting minute-level data collection and second-level control for low voltage transparency,” Li comments, stating it to be the best solution to achieve observable, measurable, adjustable, controllable, and traceable conditions on the LV side.
“This is only the beginning. By enabling the district CEOs to master digital capabilities, customers can deploy a diverse range of digital technologies in various scenarios.”
