On December 13, the conference was organized by CBN and GCL-ET (002015. SZ) jointly authored the "2023 Digital Energy Annual Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") at the 2023 Capital Annual Conference of China Business Network. The report looks forward to the eight future development trends of digital energy from the aspects of computing power, low carbon, and power grid security, and shows the practical application of digital and intelligent technologies from the fields of new energy and traditional energy such as photovoltaic, wind power, hydrogen energy, and petroleum, as well as the value and significance brought by these technologies to the digital transformation of energy, and discusses how information flow and energy flow can effectively interact. The following is an excerpt from the Report.
Energy and computing power show a new trend of integrated development - the energy-consuming attribute of computing power itself needs energy guarantee, and the development of computing power can feed back the energy industry for digital upgrading, which determines the growth space and development potential of digital energy to a certain extent.
In October 2023, the "Action Plan for the High-Quality Development of Computing Infrastructure" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other six departments mentioned "computing power + energy", that is, to accelerate the construction of an energy computing power application center, support the intelligent energy production and scheduling system, realize the interaction of source, grid and load, multi-energy synergy and complementarity, and intelligent regulation and control of energy demand, and encourage leading enterprises to build data centers to provide integrated computing power of "energy flow, business flow, and data flow".
The synergistic integration of power and computing power is the trend of the times. The new power system is an important means to achieve the "double carbon" goal, and if we want to gradually increase the proportion of new energy power generation on the basis of ensuring the safety and reliability of energy and power and ensuring the power demand of economic and social development, it is necessary to achieve an effective balance between safety, economy and low carbon with the help of computing power.
In terms of security, the intermittent and fluctuating power generation characteristics of new energy have brought a series of challenges to the construction and operation of new power systems, and the investment in computing power can accurately predict the power generation of new energy, improve the ability of intelligent collaborative control, and improve system security protection. Therefore, accelerating the digital transformation of the energy and power sector and continuously strengthening the construction of computing power networks are bound to be included in the long-term development plan of digital energy.
In terms of economy, due to the limitations of the analysis tools and methods of the traditional power system in mainland China, the asset utilization rate is low, and the current utilization rate of the main network equipment is about 40%, and the utilization rate of the distribution network is about 30%. With the support of computing power and data analysis, the power grid equipment can be measured, observable, controllable, and analyzed, improve asset utilization, and reduce the amount of investment in the power grid or distribution network.
In terms of low carbon, while increasing the application of new energy sources such as wind power and photovoltaics, the new power system is also becoming more dependent on resources, weather and environment, and the power generation time will be affected by geographical location and seasonality. Therefore, new energy power generation and load forecasting need to be supported by computing power. At present, the acquisition and processing of high-quality multi-source data related to the power grid is inseparable from the support of computing power, and computing power also needs to be empowered by electricity. As the infrastructure of computing power, the power consumption of data centers should not be underestimated, of which electricity costs account for about 60% of operating costs. The "Eastern Data and Western Computing" project is promoting the transfer of data centers to the western region where renewable energy is more abundant, and realizing the coordinated development of green power and green computing power.
Since 2019, the state has successively issued a number of policies to promote the adoption of clean energy in data centers. The theoretical installed power of traditional wind power and photovoltaic power generation can meet the power demand of data centers, but the high-performance equipment of data centers has higher requirements for power supply stability, which is structurally contradictory to the volatility and intermittency of wind power and photovoltaic power generation.
The clean energy integration base aims to continuously strengthen the capacity building of new energy power consumption and cross-regional transmission, promote the centralized development of wind power and photovoltaic power generation in an orderly manner, and actively promote the construction of a multi-energy complementary clean energy base.
Therefore, the coordinated development of "green data center + clean energy integrated base" is feasible and inevitable. Among the nine major clean energy integration bases in the national "14th Five-Year Plan", the total scale exceeds 200GW, of which 7 are located in the central and western regions, and the installed capacity of each large base is more than 10 million kilowatts, which can fully meet the power demand of data centers.
With the large-scale access of distributed energy represented by photovoltaics, integrated terminals represented by electric vehicles, and fast-growing user-side energy storage, the stable operation of the power grid is facing great challenges. The computing power composed of a large number of high-performance hardware can meet the needs of advanced applications of grid artificial intelligence in large-scale and complex smart grids. The important role of artificial intelligence computing power in regulating the power grid, balancing power supply and demand, optimizing power flow distribution, supporting the coordinated interaction of source, grid, load and storage, and ensuring the safe and stable operation of the power system is becoming increasingly apparent.
As the key support to promote the integration of computing power and energy, leading enterprises are exploring more typical application scenarios for the development of energy computing power. GCL Group accelerates digital energy with "power + energy storage + computing power", and develops source-grid-load-storage, optical storage, charging, and computing in a coordinated manner.
In August 2023, GCL-ET (002015. SZ) unveiled China's first energy intelligent computing center in Suzhou, which is expected to have a computing power scale of 1000P after full operation, mainly focusing on energy model training. On December 6, the company's second intelligent computing center, GCL Intelligent Computing (Shanghai) Center, was put into operation in Baoshan District, Shanghai, which is the first thousand-p-level intelligent computing center in Shanghai focusing on the vertical field of energy and transportation, and the total computing power is expected to reach 1,000p by the end of 2023. In the future, the company plans to establish 15 energy computing centers around the world by the end of 2024.
Up to now, a number of manufacturers with computing resources are stepping up the layout of intelligent computing centers.