On March 22, the "2024 Second Zhejiang Photovoltaic Storage Industry Development Conference" hosted by Zhejiang Solar Photovoltaic Industry Association and National Energy Research Institute, and organized by International Energy Network, Photovoltaic Toutiao and Energy Storage Toutiao, was held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Li Zhenming, deputy general manager of Zhejiang Zhengtai Zhiwei Energy Service Co., Ltd., delivered a keynote speech on the topic of "Digital Intelligent Operation and Maintenance and Full-cycle Management of New Energy Power Stations".
He pointed out that under the pressure of grid parity, it is one of the important ways to improve its competitiveness by reducing costs and increasing efficiency through digital and intelligent transformation in the new energy post-service industry. The digital intelligent operation and maintenance and full-cycle management solution of CHINT Zhiwei new energy power station promotes the improvement of operation and maintenance management efficiency of new energy power stations and effectively reduces the operation and maintenance costs of power stations.
Unmanned operation and maintenance is the ultimate goal
Li Zhenming believes that the current market capacity and competitive environment pose new challenges to O&M. As of December 2023, the cumulative installed capacity of PV has reached 609.49GW, and it is expected that the new PV installed capacity will continue to grow in the future, and the development space of the new energy industry is huge. At the same time, from 2023, many state-owned enterprises, local enterprises, and emerging enterprises will enter the market, and the competition in the operation and maintenance market will intensify, which will put forward higher requirements for operation and maintenance quality and cost control capabilities.
Li Zhenming believes that the new energy post-service industry needs to change its concept: "From the traditional operation and maintenance relying on screen monitoring personnel and on-site operation and maintenance personnel and management personnel to carry out the operation, inspection, elimination and other management work of the power station, it has become automated, information-based and intelligent management, and the ultimate goal is to realize the operation and maintenance management mode of 'unmanned power station'." ”
In Li Zhenming's view, the operation and maintenance management of photovoltaic power plants is divided into five stages:
The 1.0 stage is "arbitrary management", without on-site real-time management, and the awareness of operation and maintenance management is weak.
The 2.0 stage is "watching the field", and there is basic care on site, but the degree of control of the station is still weak.
The 3.0 stage is "factory-style", in this stage, there are technical personnel at the operation and maintenance site, the technical management work is improved, and the degree of control of the station is strengthened, but the management method is more traditional and the operation and maintenance cost is relatively high.
The 4.0 stage is "informatization". Li Zhenming said: "The operation of the power station will generate all kinds of data, and informatization is to make these data generate value, which can guide the on-site operation and maintenance personnel to work more efficiently." At this stage, information technology provides assistance, and the on-site operation and maintenance are combined with the cloud platform, which partially realizes the vision of "less people on duty and no attendance", improves management efficiency, and achieves results in reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
The 5.0 stage is "digital intelligence", big data and AI technologies have been widely used, intelligent operation and maintenance management has been basically realized, operation and maintenance services have been more diversified, and the value of the whole life cycle of power stations has been greatly improved. Li Zhenming said: "This stage is not decided by people, but by digital decision-making, driven by digital and process-driven O&M, and using big data and AI technology to achieve intelligent O&M. ”
At present, the operation and maintenance management level of most power stations is between 3.0 and 4.0, and some leading enterprises are moving from 4.0 to 5.0, but no power station has truly realized 5.0 digital and intelligent operation and maintenance.
"Unattended (remote centralized monitoring) and less manned (unattended satellite station)" is the current scientific and technological operation and maintenance service plan of CHINT Zhiwei: with technical support and closed-loop management process as the driving means, scientific, accurate and efficient decision-making to optimize the allocation of production resources, realize unmanned/less manned, centralized and remote management, and ultimately ensure the safe, reliable and efficient operation of the power station.
Li Zhenming introduced that the realization of "unmanned and less manned" requires four data foundations: flexible and customizable large-screen display, optimized development of software, hardware and configuration methods, visualization of the power production process, and component-level refined data access.
Intelligent operation reduces costs and increases efficiency
Unattended, relying on intelligence. CHINT Zhiwei continues to consolidate its R&D and innovation capabilities, and has created intelligent operation and maintenance methods such as active screen monitoring, unmanned inspection, self-closed-loop defect elimination, intelligent cleaning, and efficient weeding, and set up a safety shield for the power station with intelligent technology to reduce costs and increase efficiency of the power station.
Li Zhenming focused on the digital twin technology used in CHINT Zhiwei's active screen monitoring, which is ahead of the photovoltaic operation and maintenance industry: calibrating the position of inverters, photovoltaic strings, combiner boxes and other equipment, and realizing the trajectory tracking and optimal route navigation of personnel through intelligent terminal satellite positioning; visualizing the infrared recognition results of string drones, which can indicate the location and type of component defects; and realizing functions such as lighting and shadow analysis, distance and area measurement in the 3D model, and panoramic display of accurate entity, location and level description.
On this basis, the on-duty personnel of the centralized control center only need to monitor and patrol the screen of the photovoltaic power station, focusing on alarms and work orders. Li Zhenming said: "The staff on duty is to inspect the power station and track it in time, rather than finding problems. The platform has exposed the problem, and the on-duty personnel can track the alarms in the platform, without spending more time and energy to analyze the fragmented information. ”
Based on image and voiceprint recognition technology, the drone is equipped with infrared and visible light dual cameras to take photos of photovoltaic modules, which can automatically identify module defects and their locations, and generate alarms synchronously with the identification results, and display the string number, location, and defect type in the panoramic base map. Compared with manual inspection, UAV inspection can comprehensively save 700 manpower, save about 175,000 yuan in labor costs, and recover about 1.887 million kWh of power loss.
Self-closed-loop defect elimination is a powerful means of state maintenance, and CHINT Zhiwei has performed well in this technology: the introduction of fault trees and reasoning machines has formed a complete system to improve equipment reliability and operation and maintenance efficiency. The diagnostic center is linked to the work order system, mining feature quantities in historical data, and combining expert knowledge base and algorithm models to promote the update of the knowledge base and the evolution of algorithms.
Li Zhenming showed a self-closed-loop defect elimination application case: a power station automatically generated an inefficient work order for the NB22 inverter on the platform, and from the work order information, it can be seen that the cause of the inefficiency is "dust accumulation on the lower edge of the module", and after the processing, the system self-test is qualified, and the power generation capacity is increased by 28%.
Intelligent cleaning and efficient weeding are also important technical means to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Li Zhenming said: "Intelligent cleaning and efficient weeding, everyone thinks that there is not a lot of technical content, in fact, the key point of the technology here is that the platform analyzes and diagnoses the data to calculate when to clean, when to weed, and how much weeding, which is an optimization process, and these calculations are rooted in a deep technical foundation." ”
Taking high-efficiency weeding as an example, the platform can perform dynamic shading analysis for the model of the built photovoltaic power station, verify whether the array spacing is reasonable and whether there is occlusion between arrays, calculate whether there is shadow occlusion of obstacles during actual operation, and assist in analyzing module shading through the current variation law of the string and the daily equivalent power generation hours.
Cloud-edge collaboration, unattended
Traditional O&M is to upload power station data to the cloud for centralized data analysis, but Chint Zhiwei believes that this data processing method is difficult to achieve the goal of "no one on duty and few people on duty".
On the basis of this realistic demand, CHINT Zhiwei has developed the model of "Future on the Cloud, Frontier Intelligent World". Li Zhenming explained: "This system is focused on the 'edge' end, the concept of 'edge' is to collect data, diagnosis, analysis in each power station, by the robot of each power station 24 hours a year sleepless scan the power station, record the operation of the power station, analyze equipment failures, and upload the results to the cloud platform, by the cloud business platform to complete the production management business process." ”
Basic data is generated in edge scenarios, and power stations, companies, and group management applications are completed in the cloud. Its technical features are: the localized deployment of the pre-diagnosis station-side system, the use of server and edge gateway two hardware solutions, modular customization of platform diagnosis functions, through the customized edge computing gateway, can realize the rapid and lightweight deployment of the power station-level diagnosis system. "More importantly, the power station and operation and maintenance are no longer separated, but become a complete set of smart power stations. Li Zhenming said.
The site-side system eliminates the customer's governance of data security, because all the data stays local. In addition, it can also assist the field operation and maintenance personnel to quickly eliminate shortages.
This system has two benefit points: one is the station-side diagnostic system and supporting work mode, combined with networkable work orders, which can improve operation and maintenance efficiency, reduce equipment failures, and increase power generation, and the other is that the hardware is installed locally and can be detached from the site. From the perspective of the application effect of a power station, the station-side diagnostic system found and eliminated 44 defects, 29 of which would cause losses in power generation, and a total of 18,120kWh of lost electricity was recovered.
Li Zhenming introduced the advantages of CHINT Zhiwei station-end system: it not only has complete functions such as intelligent monitoring, data processing, on-site safety supervision and fault diagnosis of algorithm operation, as well as business self-closed-loop, but also has high scalability, which can be applied to power environment monitoring, virtual power plants and other scenarios, providing intelligent and digital operation and maintenance management services for the supervision and safe operation of energy scenarios.
Taking the application of this system in the energy management of virtual power plants as an example: at a single station, energy management is carried out on the system composed of photovoltaic, wind power, energy storage, charging piles, V2G, loads, etc., including real-time monitoring, intelligent control and orderly scheduling, so as to realize energy digitalization, intelligent Internet of Things, and multi-system linkage, and ensure the maximization of the interests of the main body.
Founded in 1984, CHINT Group is a world-renowned provider of smart energy system solutions. Relying on more than 10 years of experience in investment, construction and operation of the new energy industry of CHINT Group, CHINT Zhiwei is a green energy asset operation service provider focusing on third-party power operation and maintenance, and applying intelligent means to provide customers with operation and maintenance services of all regions, all types and all voltage levels, as well as new energy asset services.
CHINT Zhiwei has the operation and maintenance service capabilities throughout the whole life cycle of the power station, and can provide different types of service models according to the characteristics of the project and the needs of the owner to ensure the safe, efficient and stable operation of the power station. "Whether it is a 1-2 year power station completion and grid connection period, a 3-8 year stable rise period of power stations, a mature period of more than 8 years of power stations, and a recession period after 25 years, CHINT Zhiwei can provide customized service content. Li Zhenming said.
CHINT Zhiwei's global O&M capacity reaches 20GW, with a professional O&M team of more than 2,200 people, and the statistical indicators of production and operation exceed the national average by 3%-5%. Li Zhenming said: "Committed to becoming the world's leading green energy asset management service provider, this is the goal of CHINT Zhiwei. ”
Source: International Energy Network/PV Headlines