At the 2022 Smart Energy Conference and Press Conference on Outstanding Projects & Cases hosted by A6 Consortium on July 27-28, the “Guangdong Power Grid” virtual power plant management project, contracted by DFE, was selected as an outstanding demo project of smart energy. The project, by pooling a large number of adjustable resources on the user side and participating in auxiliary services such as power grid demand response, obtains value-added income and achieves win-win-win for power grid, load aggregators and users.

Multilevel virtual power plant business becomes booming

 “Virtual power plant is an effective market-oriented means to realize the double-carbon target. There will be hundreds of aggregators in the future.” Talking about the future development of virtual power plants, DFE General Manager Fang Zhengji said the company’s virtual power plant business not only includes those at the level of load aggregators, but also has mature applications in virtual power plants at the level of industrial parks and those on city grid side.

The “Guangdong Power Grid” virtual power plant management platform, which was put online in April this year, is a successful case of the DFE serving load aggregator virtual power plants. The platform can provide market-oriented demand response services for all users involved in market transactions, covering various flexible load resources such as energy storage, loads for industry and commerce, charging piles, and smart power consumption facilities.

On July 26, as Guangdong first opened its demand response market in 2022, the “Guangdong Power Grid” virtual power plant management platform kicked off the market-oriented demand response. On the first day of response, invited response was made in adjustable resources such as industrial interruptible and user side energy storage in the province, indicating that the “Guangdong Power Grid” platform has gained ability to provide market-oriented demand response service.

One-hour response will result in reduction of 30,000kWh power consumption, which is roughly equivalent to the power consumption made by 15,000 residential cabinet AC in one hour. “Guangdong Power Gride” virtual power plant management platform has created a complete business model according to the requirements of the market rules in Guangdong, and provided “grid format” service in the layered mode of provinces, prefectures, districts and stations. It provides three types of products, namely, prior invitation, interruptible within the day and real-time direct control, builds direct control and indirect control response capabilities according to customer type to ensure it is “observable, measurable, adjustable and controllable”.

The “Guangdong Power Grid” virtual power plant management platform project was awarded the medal of 2022 Smart Energy Outstanding Demo Project of A6 Consortium in China's power technology market, and was highly recognized by the industry.

Smart energy management helps mine flexible resources

 “In terms of peak load shaving, it considerably reduces the proportion of power consumption in peak period, and increases the proportion of power consumption in valley period. As a result, the power consumption characteristics of users are more friendly to the power grid”, said Dong Wenjie, General Manager of DFE Energy Products Department who is responsible for the Pearl Industrial Park project. By making smart energy management for all corporate users in the Pearl Industrial Park, in addition to energy saving and carbon reduction for enterprises, it deeply mines flexible and adjustable resources in the park. As a virtual power plant, it participates in the power grid demand response and other auxiliary services to provide 10MW level flexible response capacity.

The Pearl Industrial Park project has realized the multilevel flexible and friendly interaction between power grid, industrial park, enterprise and equipment. According to the framework of smart energy management provided by DFE, the smart energy management on the park side internally realizes multi-energy coordination, optimized dispatching and interaction between industrial and commercial users. Externally, it provides virtual power plant services for the superior power grid; the user side distributed autonomous integrated control realizes the energy coordination control in the user control area. Through information interaction, industrial and commercial users can easily learn about such information as equipment operation, energy efficiency monitoring, cost-benefit, etc. while getting involved in in demand response.

 “About how to realize it, the company provides data support for the construction of refined energy management through intelligent collection and control terminals, thus analyzing and controlling the closed-loop of whole process. It also optimizes the intelligent energy efficiency plan, so as to realize the optimal scheduling of the whole process of load storage in the source network. At the same time, it makes cascade utilization and multi-energy coordination of various energy categories such as cooling, heating, electricity, gas and water, thus fully exploiting the energy efficiency potential, improving the energy utilization efficiency, and realizing energy saving, consumption reduction and carbon emission reduction.” Dong Wenjie said the project has greatly improved the financial benefits of the park. The project has also become the only national key project of comprehensive energy to be exhibited in the National Sci-tech Innovation Achievement Exhibition for the 13^th Five-year Plan

In addition, the company is expected to bring additional benefits by integrating distributed and controllable resources such as energy storage, central AC, split AC and flexible load of production lines in the park, conduct aggregate management based on the characteristic analysis of distributed and controllable resources of different categories, and get involved in auxiliary services such as demand response.

Industrial chain and algorithm advantages occupy the development highland in the industry

Against the industrial background of clean energy and digital transformation of power grid seen in recent years, DFE has promoted the digital transformation in the strategic level. Relying on digital technology, it focuses on the construction of dispatching, energy storage, comprehensive energy and other industries, and gradually builds a variety of virtual power plant projects at park level, commercial level of load aggregator and urban power grid level.

Fang Zhengji said the company has been working in the power and energy industry for 40 years, which has established advantages in complete industrial chain and core algorithm, thus getting the upper hand in virtual power plant business.

As is publicly known, DFE products and services cover a number of products and solutions such as dispatching automation, centralized control station, substation protection, integrated automation, substation intelligent auxiliary monitoring system, power distribution automation, primary and secondary integration of power distribution, network security apparatuses, virtual power plant, cloud elastic control platform, business middle ground, integrated energy, intelligent patrol system, power electronic equipment, electric meter and metering system, thus forming complete industrial chain layout in power industry including source, grid, load and storage.

 “From the perspective of operating power grid system, DFE has mature products in the dispatching industry, substation industry, power distribution & use industry, new energy industry, integrated energy and industrial Internet, which can integrate the central control system with the terminal collection equipment”, said Fang Zhengji.

In addition, a number of reserves and algorithms of comprehensive knowledge are required for the management and analysis of cooling, heating, electricity, gas, water and other energy sources in the industrial park. The algorithm is also the core competitiveness of DFE.