The 2024 government work report points out that it is necessary to adhere to the development of the dual carbon route, further promote the energy revolution, control fossil energy consumption, and accelerate the construction of the energy system. However, photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium battery are experiencing a period of overcapacity, from explosive growth to steady growth, so what new opportunities will be born in the new energy industry in the next five to ten years?
At the "18th China Investment Annual Conference Annual Summit", Liu Lin, founding partner of Yuanhe Capital, presided over the topic of "New energy is a revolution" by Chen Dazhi, partner of Dingxing Quantum, Gu Xiaoli, managing director of CMC Capital, Hui Hengyu, managing partner of Chaoxi Capital, Li Mo, partner of Convergence Capital, Xia Zhongbao, partner of Zaishi Capital, Xiao Yiting, partner of Chentao Capital, and Xu Xiao, founding partner of Oriental Jiafu, conducted in-depth discussions on the topic of "new energy is a revolution".
Liu Lin raised the cycle of China's new energy industry, the future development of the industry in 5-10 years, and AI-enabled new energy.
Xu Xiao said that investors should not overestimate their own capabilities, in fact, it is difficult for everyone to predict what will happen in five to ten years, but he believes that after 2026, the iteration of new technologies and the emergence of industrial inflection points have the opportunity to resonate with the economic recovery.
Against the backdrop of uneven global electricity prices, Xiao Yiting is very optimistic about the possibility of green hydrogen as an energy source for international transportation. In addition, liquid hydrogen is also likely to usher in technological advances to prevent leaks during long-term transportation within a year or two, and many liquid hydrogen tank technology companies are expected to explode in the future.
Xia Zhongbao said that they have long firmly believed that new energy is the main force of the future, the current installed capacity of new energy and the proportion of power generation is relatively low, energy is the food of industry, if China's industry is re-iterated again, we must realize the localization of energy, from this point of view the industry space is still very large.
Gu Xiaoli believes that AI will empower new energy, such as the virtual power plant that has been popular in the past two years, AI can help it achieve a balance between supply and demand, and make adjustments through the analysis of weather, time, and user-side load, and control the entire system, and the two complement each other.
Hui Hengyu pointed out that artificial intelligence has many primary applications in the new energy manufacturing industry, such as black light factories and unmanned factories in lithium batteries, photovoltaic and other industries. In the past two years, the development of open AI and large models should be oriented to the future frontier science to solve the future development problems of new energy, such as perovskite, solid-state batteries, controllable nuclear fusion and other issues, and accelerate the implementation of the industry.
Li Mo said that the combination of AI and new energy lies in the manufacturing process, smart grid, and material research and development. Therefore, their investment follows two main lines, one is the information revolution and the other is electrification, and AI and new energy will inevitably converge and integrate and will inevitably promote each other.
Chen Dazhi believes that it would be too narrow to simply understand new energy as wind, solar, lithium, water and vehicles, and he believes that green technology will definitely be one of the top tracks in the world in the next decade. They have been putting hydrogen energy in the investment observation pool, although the inflection point has not yet arrived, if it has a major technological breakthrough in manufacturing costs, conversion efficiency, and transportation costs, it will definitely enter their investment scope.
The following is a transcript of the on-site discussion, which was compiled by ChinaVentures:
Liu Lin (host): Thank you, I am Liu Lin, the founder of Yuanhe Capital, and I am very honored to be able to host the roundtable dialogue of the 18th China Investment Annual Conference, and the 2024 government work report points out that it is necessary to adhere to the development of the dual carbon route, further promote the energy revolution, control fossil energy consumption, and accelerate the construction of the energy system. First of all, I would like you to briefly introduce yourself and your institution, and introduce the main strategies and methods of each institution in the field of new energy.
Chen Dazhi: Hello everyone, I am from Dingxing Quantum Investment. Our company was established in 2013 and has a cumulative management scale of more than 7 billion. Our main investment direction is high-end manufacturing, specifically, we have three more focused subdivisions, electronic information, aerospace, green technology. Our investment stage is more focused on mid-to-early stage, with 72% of our projects being mid-to-early-stage projects; Our investment strategy is more inclined to lead the investment, and 55% of our projects are participated as lead investors; Our investment preference is technology-driven, and our investment in specialized and special new projects accounts for 40% of the number of projects we invest. In the field of new energy, we pay more attention to emerging markets that are about to break out when the inflection point is coming.
Gu Xiaoli: Hello everyone, I am Gu Xiaoli from CMC Capital, and I am responsible for the investment and fundraising in the field of new energy in our fund. Our fund has been established for 14 years and has a total management scale of more than 30 billion RMB, including sovereign funds from China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. For the new energy industry, we set up a special RMB fund for new energy with local governments and industry leaders last year. In the past 13 years, we have invested in more than 70 companies, most of which have participated as lead investors, and we have achieved more than 30 exits in 13 years.
When it comes to the investment strategy of the fund, there are three major features:
First, we focus on the mid-to-late stage and mature stage of our investment, and attach great importance to the exit of project investment, especially at this point in time.
Second, one of the things we have been doing is to help our portfolio companies go global and bring in advanced overseas companies, and there have been several successful cases in the past 13 years.
Third, we pay more attention to the excavation of underwater projects, and we can see that the vast majority of our portfolio companies are not necessarily hot projects in the market, and there may not be too many other shareholders besides our institutions.
Hui Hengyu: Hello everyone, I'm Hui Hengyu from Chaoxi Capital. Founded in Shanghai in 2015, Chaoxi Capital has focused on two tracks in the past eight years, one is new energy and the other is electronics & semiconductors. Before 2021, we focused on industrial mergers and acquisitions as our main products, and after 2021, we shifted to industrial investment in the form of minority investment. Our main sources of funding include many partners from industry. We are an industry-oriented, industry-based investment institution with industrial synergy as the starting point.
On the track of the new energy industry, our main investment areas are light, storage, hydrogen, charging, and carbon. Since August last year, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has provided some window guidance on new energy listings, and we have reduced our investment in mid- and late-stage projects and focused more on early- and medium-term projects. Based on our understanding of the industry, we help enterprises complete industrial strategic planning and the lifting of industrial resources, so that enterprises can achieve a relatively rapid upgrade and transformation from small to large, and we have also achieved a better return on investment in the process.
Li Mo: Hello everyone, I am Li Mo from Shenzhen Aggregation Capital, our team is basically some large enterprises in Shenzhen, such as Huawei, ZTE, BYD and other industrial backgrounds, so our investment style is rooted in this industry, we hope that the industry can dig out some unique highlight projects, our investment direction is not entirely in the new energy sector, our basic plate is actually called ICT with semiconductors as the core.
Based on this basic disk, we have three new directions, one is energy materials, the new energy field we talk about today, and we call the auto track the auto track when we separate the auto parts from the car, in addition to the battery, and there is also an intelligent computing, just like AI and server-related, we call the intelligent computing track.
Today's theme of new energy is a relatively broad concept, just with our three tracks are basically related, so I made some preparations before coming, I counted in our investment projects, new energy related and automobile-related combined, about more than half of our investment in this project, and relatively speaking, the development is relatively good, so I feel that participating in this round table is the right participation.
Xia Zhongbao: Hello everyone, I am Xia Zhongbao from Zaishi Capital, we are an industrial investment institution perpendicular to the field of new energy, which was initiated and established by GCL in 2017 and is currently managing 5 funds. We have been committed to investing in the field of energy transformation, and we focus on the process, equipment, materials and supporting services of the entire industrial chain of new energy.
Xiao Yiting: Hello everyone, I am Xiao Yiting of Chentao Capital, Chentao Capital was established in 2014, and currently has a cumulative management fund of more than 5 billion yuan, mainly covering the track and focusing on the new energy electric vehicle industry chain, artificial intelligence intelligent driving, high-end intelligent manufacturing three major sectors, I am mainly responsible for artificial intelligence intelligent driving and hydrogen energy investment.
Because we are optimistic about the advantages of the hydrogen energy track in the direction of storage and transportation, our layout in 2023 is entirely in hydrogen energy storage and transportation, including liquid hydrogen storage tanks, pipelines, hydrogen liquefaction equipment and green ammonia as a green hydrogen carrier.
Xu Xiao: Hello everyone, I am Xu Xiao of Oriental Jiafu, Oriental Jiafu is a science and technology investment platform under Zhejiang Oriental, Zhejiang Oriental is a provincial listed financial holding platform in Zhejiang Province, the stock code is 600120, welcome to pay attention. The main business of our group is financial control, and the funds are mainly invested in the field of science and technology.
Founded in 2016, Oriental Jiafu has managed a total of about 17 billion funds in the past 8 years, and the investment amount has been stable at about 1.5 billion yuan per year for five consecutive years, and the number of investment projects has remained at about 30 per year. 70% of our funds are invested in the early and middle stages, and 30% in the growth stage. From the perspective of the new energy industry, we cover all segments, including batteries, energy storage, hydrogen energy, etc.
Liu Lin (host): Founded in 2019, we are a newcomer to the capital market, so far we have a management scale of about 4.5 billion yuan, more than 70 investment projects, and 6 listed projects. From the perspective of investment regions, we focus on investment in Shandong, radiating the whole country, with 50% of the funds invested in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Jiangsu and Zhejiang; From the perspective of investment stage, we invest early and small, and 80% of the funds are invested in early, mid-term and growth-stage projects; From the perspective of investment industries, we focus on six major industries, including new materials, new energy, information technology, medical and health, intelligent manufacturing, and aerospace.
For the new energy industry, we have a relatively simple approach, focusing on some core materials, core devices, and electronic control systems in the upstream of new energy, which is related to the industrial characteristics of our Shandong. In the field related to green electricity, because Yantai has a large chemical enterprise like Wanhua.
Where is the biggest opportunity for new energy?
Liu Lin (Moderator): In the past decade, China's new energy industry has experienced rapid development, and a number of great enterprises have been born in photovoltaic, lithium battery, wind power, new energy, energy storage and other industries. However, there is a view that this vigorous development cycle may be close to the top, and in the next five to ten years, where do you think the biggest opportunities for new energy will appear?
Xu Xiao: Every era has opportunities in every era, I started to invest in photovoltaics in 2007 when I entered the industry to do dollar investment, and we have seen that photovoltaic has come from generation to generation, and has experienced a lot of big waves, and finally survived to become a leader in the industry.
As investors, we should not overestimate our own abilities and judgments, and it is actually difficult for us to judge exactly what will happen in ten years' time. In 2019, everyone was pessimistic about Tesla and NIO, and then think about how optimistic everyone was about Tesla and NIO in 2021. So don't overestimate your abilities too much, especially in five to ten years, what we can do is to take advantage of the big opportunities now.
We grasp the new energy field, and we believe that there are systematic opportunities in the hydrogen energy track, such as energy storage and sodium electricity technology iteration. Of course, these systemic opportunities will not blossom in the next few years, from the perspective of our institutions, we give the perspective to 2026, we feel that the iteration of new technologies and the emergence of industrial inflection points have the opportunity to form some resonance with the economic recovery. This is an opportunity in the direction of new technology iteration in the field of new energy.
We think that the new energy industry is very rolling, including the gross profit margin disclosed in the annual report of listed companies of energy storage last year is negative, and there is no volume, but it can only continue to be rolled, but in the process of volume, there may be opportunities for stock games in the past two or three years, in addition to investing in the iteration and development of new technologies, we also have a considerable part of the funds to support the leading enterprises in the industry, not necessarily listed companies, may be the leading start-up companies in the industry, to help them do the integration of the industry, the integration of the team, The integration of assets and customer networks will have great investment opportunities.
The first is that the management team must be relatively mature, and must have the ability to receive assets and customers, secondly, his products and technologies have been relatively mature, and the third is that the certainty of the technology trend and the competitive situation of the subdivision itself have been relatively clear. Therefore, there are many special opportunities in the process of investment, and the key is our basic skills, the system and methodology of investment, and whether our ability to polish it systematically and structurally.
Xiao Yiting: I think there are still a lot of opportunities for new energy this year, so let's focus on the opportunities we see at Chentao Capital. At present, the wind and solar resources are uneven in the world, the wind and solar resources in the Middle East are very good, but the electricity consumption is very small, and the wind and solar resources in Europe, Japan and South Korea are relatively poor, but the electricity consumption is large, so the global electricity price is uneven.
We are very bullish on the possibility of green hydrogen as an energy source for international transportation. There is a problem with investing in new energy or any track, which requires a lot of forecast data to make judgments, and the price in three or five years is completely different, and it is impossible to calculate why we want to make such an investment at the current price. According to reliable international research reports, the next LCOE in the Middle East will reach 1 cent, and the price of green hydrogen will reach $1 per kilogram. The storage and transportation of hydrogen energy is a very important cost, whether it is from the west to the east of China, or from the Middle East to Japan, South Korea, Europe, we see this opportunity, green ammonia in the medium term may be an opportunity, like ammonia doped power generation, there are some national policies that are supported, such as South Korea, there are some underwriters who are willing to discuss with us.
In addition, liquid hydrogen, including hydrogen liquefaction equipment and storage tanks, because it needs to be minus 253 degrees, long-term transportation to prevent leakage requires technological progress, we believe that the maturity of technology may be within a year or two, we are based on the future 1 kilogram of hydrogen price, transported to Europe, the sales price is within 4 euros is very competitive because the price in Europe will also fall, we cooperate with lower light optimization costs, better performance, storage tanks as a carrier, long-term use of hydrogen chloride as a carrier to do international energy trade, This is a new opportunity that we see, there are a lot of relevant policies on the EU side, and at present, in general, they expect to import about 10 million by 2030, which is a market opportunity close to one trillion yuan, and we believe that there should be a lot of technology companies in this field that store and transport related liquid hydrogen storage tanks, and we also see that there has been a very good momentum in the procurement of orders or international projects.
Xia Zhongbao: from the perspective of investment institutions in the field of new energy, we have long firmly believed that new energy is the main force in the future, fundamentally speaking, the current installed capacity of new energy and the proportion of power generation is relatively very low, from China's point of view, energy is the food of industry, if China's industry is re-iterated again, you must realize the localization of energy, local control, this perspective of this space is still very large, the management of the opportunity we see in the photovoltaic field first, in recent years, the efficiency of the improvement is very fast. From the perspective of the entire industrial chain, the changes and changes of new energy, we believe that there is a chance in the short term, and after this wave of baptism and cycle, there is a great possibility of taking off again.
Li Mo: Actually, it is difficult to judge in five to ten years, but we still have to judge, it is not enough to be based on the present, how to do it? From the perspective of our organization, we believe that we need to see the direction of the future, but we may not be able to see the exact time node, but the direction must be roughly correct.
From this point of view, in the past few decades, we believe that there are two main lines for large industries, the first main line is the revolution of information technology, before I saw a guest talk about the revolution of information technology, including the past ten or twenty years, including the Internet, mobile Internet and now deep learning to large models, this main line continues to extend, and there is also a main line is electricity, which can be understood as electrification, and can also be understood as the continuous maturity of battery technology, which is a main line.
Now the main line of the battery is in lithium battery, or electrochemistry represented by lithium battery, in fact, it is a mainstream, new energy vehicles are just an application of this main line in the transportation industry, you can see that this main line is actually the two major directions of world development, and our investment is basically along these two directions, especially in the field of their combination of investment, we believe that there will not be too much deviation.
Electricity is the best secondary energy source, whether it is photovoltaic, wind power or controlled nuclear fusion in the future, electricity is inseparable. New forms of energy, such as hydrogen, will certainly occupy more and more space, but anything that goes against this main line, I don't think there is a very large investment value, but it is indeed a supplement. Thank you.
Hui Hengyu: The biggest opportunity, my personal thinking is to look at it from two dimensions, one is the market space, and the other is the growth rate. Based on Chaoxi's industry observation, in the next five to ten years, the first opportunity lies in new energy storage. At present, photovoltaic has been upgraded from supplementary energy to the main energy source, but due to the intermittency and instability of renewable energy itself, new energy storage will play an important role in solving the problem of power supply and demand matching and volatility.
By the end of 2023, the cumulative installed capacity of new energy storage will reach 89GW, and the new operation scale will account for about half. The penetration rate of existing energy storage is only 6%, and the penetration rate of new energy storage is about 13%.
At present, there is still a big gap between China and overseas countries in the construction of new power systems. In the United States, new energy has become a very important source of electricity supply, with the distribution and storage rate in the United States exceeding 50%, and in regions such as California, the distribution and storage rate has exceeded 70%. The U.S. net electricity price metering bill is also promoting the integrated installation of photovoltaic and storage.
There have also been some changes on the domestic policy side, such as the "Regulatory Measures for the Full Guaranteed Purchase of Renewable Energy" implemented on April 1 this year, to encourage more renewable energy power generation to enter the electricity market trading, and the guaranteed power generation of full purchase may only account for 30% of the total power generation. It is necessary to store electricity during the day and send out electricity at night to increase revenue, which is a very important solution.
On the whole, the market growth rate and increment of new energy storage in the future will be great. Of course, the premise is that we need to continue to work hard to solve many problems, including how to increase energy density, increase the number of system cycles, and reduce unit costs, so as to achieve the replacement of photovoltaic storage parity with thermal power parity. There's a lot of opportunity here.
The second opportunity is the application of new energy to green chemical scenarios. In 2023, China's new energy photovoltaic installed capacity will be 216.88GW, and the cumulative installed capacity has reached 610GW. At present, the average curtailment rate of PV in China is about 3%, and it is simply understood that more than a dozen GW of photovoltaic power generation will be wasted directly due to various problems such as not being able to connect to the grid for consumption.
Then, if this electricity is used for off-grid hydrogen production, the cost of hydrogen production will be greatly reduced, as mentioned just now, 1 dollar and 1 kilogram can be completely realized. Then, when the cost of electricity reaches 1 cent or even lower, the price economy of green hydrogen can be demonstrated, and then extended to the industrial chain, it will definitely bring a very large scale of industrial and equipment investment. According to the current curtailment rate, it can support the scale of hydrogen production of hundreds of thousands of tons, and the scale of industrial investment is more than 100 billion yuan. In the future, the country will gradually relax the requirements for the consumption of new energy electricity, that is to say, the curtailment rate will further increase, so there will be great growth opportunities for the market of new energy applied to chemical scenarios in the next five to ten years.
Gu Xiaoli: We are still very far from achieving the goal of carbon neutrality by 2060, and I think the industry is far from peaking. New energy is one of the few industries in China with a scale of more than one trillion yuan, and it can still grow by 20% or even 30% annualized in the next five years. What everyone feels more about new energy is the current overcapacity and cyclical bottoming. This problem should also be viewed from two sides, the involution of multiple links in the industrial chain has undoubtedly led to the decline of the cost of the whole industry. Just now, Mr. Xia said that last year, domestic power stations and photovoltaic power stations sold crazy one after another, and the revenue of distributed photovoltaic increased significantly, the fundamental reason is that the cost has decreased, and the downstream has been opened, which is the case in China and overseas. Due to the sharp decline in the cost of new energy products, the downstream such as photovoltaic power stations and energy storage power stations have risen in terms of yields, which has significantly improved the prosperity of the downstream of the industry.
In addition, from the rise of new energy vehicles in 2016, to the present lithium mine price has gone through two complete cycles, is currently at a relatively low point, if history repeats itself in the future, for this kind of enterprises is the opportunity to layout. China is now emphasizing more and more autonomy and controllability of the whole industrial chain, as well as the bottleneck of materials, which is also a threshold.
I believe very much in the future of the hydrogen energy industry, Japan was the first to develop hydrogen vehicles, not to mention China, and Prager Energy in the United States should be the first company in the world to be established. In 1997, it was the same in Europe, and BP and some of the giants were doing it. I think the biggest area of hydrogen energy is not necessarily in fuel cell vehicles, but in some other energy storage applications, such as: water electrolysis, hydrogen production, including some opportunities in the chemical field, I think there will be a larger market in these aspects.
Chen Dazhi: First of all, answer whether new energy has reached the top. This involves the definition of new energy, if you simply understand new energy as wind, solar, lithium, storage, vehicles, I think it is too narrow, from this narrow point of view, if there is no major technological innovation (such as perovskite, a major revolution in photovoltaic materials), may be a little less explosive. However, in 2016, 194 countries around the world signed the Paris Agreement, and in 2020, China launched the "3060 Dual Carbon Strategy", which laid the foundation for our investment.
In essence, we invest in carbon reduction and carbon neutrality. From this point of view, wind, solar, lithium, storage, and vehicles are just a few of them. Wind and solar power are used to reduce carbon emissions from power generation; The power battery of new energy vehicles is to reduce the carbon emissions of ground transportation; Energy storage is to solve the stability of the power system. From the perspective of carbon neutrality and carbon reduction, the market size of many Lingyue domains will not be smaller than the above points, so our company does not mention new energy, we call it green technology, and green technology will definitely be one of the top tracks in the world in the next ten years, so we must strengthen our confidence.
Secondly, what opportunities do we see right now? We have two pools for the industries we are optimistic about, one is the observation pool, we put the future that can be expected but the inflection point has not reached this pool, and the other pool is that we feel that the inflection point has arrived, which is the focus of our attention, specifically including CCUS, long-term energy storage, methane emission reduction, green aviation and other new tracks.
Finally, answer the moderator's opinion on hydrogen energy vehicles. We have also looked at hydrogen for a long time, and at present hydrogen is in our observation pool, which means that we feel that the inflection point has not yet arrived, and the reason is also very clear, we all know that the main problem of hydrogen is cost, and the cost is mainly composed of three parts, the first is the manufacturing cost, the second is the conversion efficiency, and the third is the transportation cost. Compared with lithium batteries, lithium batteries naturally solve the problem of transportation costs and conversion efficiency, and as long as the cost of scale can be reduced, but the problem facing hydrogen now is that the cost of these three parts needs to be solved, so we think it will take some time. We put it in the observation pool, and there are major technological breakthroughs in these points, which will definitely enter our investment scope.
AI and + new energy, dual carbon
Liu Lin (host): Regarding photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium battery, the old three have indeed been phased overcapacity, from explosive growth to steady growth, the guests have reached a consensus, if it has reached the top, we think it is too early, in the next five to ten years, which industries in the new energy industry will give birth to new opportunities? There is controversy among the guests, and the controversy lies in hydrogen energy, but some of our guests are not optimistic, and some of our guests are still waiting, since we are on this track, we should be firmly optimistic about this track. So today, rightly or wrongly, we see it as an opportunity.
There is also a trend of intelligent driving, just now we did not talk about new energy vehicles, if we talk about intelligent driving, new energy vehicles must have a chance, the next five to ten years will be born a new trillion-level track, from the upstream of water electrolysis to hydrogen energy, to the midstream of hydrogen energy infrastructure, including hydrogen pipelines, etc., to the downstream hydrogen vehicles, hydrogen refueling stations, core parts production will develop rapidly, this is the problem of the timeline. Driven by the subsidy policy, the installed capacity of green power and energy storage will soar, which is the consensus formed by everyone, and will greatly drive the upstream and downstream industrial chain.
When it comes to new energy vehicles, we believe that intelligent driving will give rise to new tracks and bring more incremental value to new energy vehicles. Last year, OpenAI used ChatGPT to detonate artificial intelligence, and the iteration of the technology was very rapid, and this year, after the emergence of Sora, everyone shouted that AGI is coming. What are the places where AI, new energy, and carbon peaking and carbon neutrality can be combined and transformed? Are there areas where change has taken place, but people have neglected or not paid enough attention? Please ask Mr. Chen of Dingxing Quantum to answer this question first.
Chen Dazhi: First of all, let's talk about the changes of AI + new energy. Artificial intelligence is indeed hot this year, whether in the primary market or the secondary market, it is expected that the hottest thing in the venue is AI before coming today, and the most popular is indeed AI. At present, whether it is long text, images, or videos, AI is an efficiency tool on the application side, and from this point of view, we believe that the industrial revolution led by AI has not yet arrived.
Throughout history, for example, with the invention of the internal combustion engine, it took about nine years for the first four-stroke internal combustion engine to be used in automobiles, so the industrial revolution caused by AI is not so fast. If we just look at it as an efficiency tool, we look back at the big data outlet in 2015 and 2016, which was also very popular at that time, and at that time, in essence, big data was applied as an efficiency tool, and it was actually difficult to find a monetization model, so AI itself needed a little time.
The combination of AI and new energy, we think this is an inevitable result, because these two things complement each other, AI and new energy are similar to the relationship between the brain and the heart, last year's artificial intelligence conference when Musk said that there will be a shortage of electricity in two years, this year Huang Jenxun said that AI will burn 14 earth's energy energy, Open AI founder Altman said that the two major currencies in the future are computing power plus energy.
On the whole, these two things are inseparable, and will definitely produce revolutionary products in industry, and we may still be discussing whether AI is a replacement for human beings, historically, as long as it is an industrial revolution, it must not replace human beings, for example, the birth of the internal combustion engine, which has caused a revolution in automobiles, ships, aircraft, and military forces, and made carriage drivers unemployed, but it has created more jobs such as drivers and pilots, and from the perspective of human development, every industrial revolution is to create more advanced productivity. So from this point of view, the transformation of AI + new energy will take time.
Secondly, there is no change that has taken place and has been ignored by everyone. I think one point worth everyone's attention is that our new infrastructure, especially in the central and western regions, computing power will become a new type of infrastructure. There is a huge obstacle to the new infrastructure, which is energy consumption, and we all know that high-energy enterprises are not welcome everywhere.
However, we saw that in July last year, the Central Reform Commission deliberated and adopted the "Opinions on Promoting the Dual Control of Energy Consumption and Gradually Shifting to the Dual Control of Carbon Emissions", and this year's government work report also wrote into it, and the dual control of energy consumption has changed to the dual control of carbon emissions, which shows that if you use green electricity, you are not a high-emission enterprise, and you can vigorously develop it, which gives supercomputing centers and data centers a huge space for development.
Looking at the giants, almost all data-based listed companies and Internet manufacturers have promised to achieve 100% green power in computing power by 2030, which will have a huge demand for green electricity. This is one of the reasons why we are investing in long-term energy storage.
Gu Xiaoli: I think AI, artificial intelligence and new energy complement each other, empower each other, and develop together. I've seen some statistics that in 2022, the global data center accounted for 2% of the world's energy consumption, and some predict that this proportion will triple in 2026. The most exaggerated prediction I see is that after 2030, half of the world's electricity will be used for computing and cooling.
While there are structural changes in the whole new type of electricity, wind and solar energy are undoubtedly the biggest beneficiaries. In fact, giants in the field of AI have also paid attention to this, for example, Amazon, which is crazy enough to buy Nvidia H100 chip GPU, has nearly 500 wind and solar power stations in the world, and Huawei is the same, they invested in the construction of a computing center in Inner Mongolia, and the power used is nearby wind and solar resources, which makes me very convinced that the development of AI is inseparable from new energy.
At the same time, I also believe that AI will empower new energy. For example, the biggest problem with wind is that it is highly volatile, especially susceptible to weather. With the introduction and help of AI, the problem of large fluctuations on the demand side of the entire power grid can be solved. For example, in the past two years, AI can help the virtual power plant that has been relatively popular in the past two years to achieve a balance between supply and demand, and make adjustments through the analysis of weather, time, and user-side load, and control the entire system, I think it is complementary to each other.
Hui Hengyu: Artificial intelligence has been partially transforming the new energy industry, such as lithium batteries, photovoltaic and other industries, and now there are many black light factories and unmanned factories, which is the primary application of artificial intelligence in the manufacturing industry. In the past two years, the development of open AI and large models should be oriented to the future frontier science to solve the future development of new energy and accelerate the implementation of the industry. For example, perovskites, solid-state batteries, controlled nuclear fusion, etc., I also see that many overseas scientists are making a lot of efforts and attempts.
For example, some Australian scientists use AI to analyze millions of perovskite formulations in a short period of time, improving the detection speed and reducing the error rate, realizing their forward-looking voice in this field. Including in the field of controlled nuclear fusion, the problem of plasma instability is being solved with Open AI.
The Microsoft team in the United States is using Open AI to analyze the composition and structure of solid-state batteries, analyzing nearly 100,000 materials in 80 hours, compared to more than 20 years of manual analysis. I believe that the breakthrough development of big data models and AI will further accelerate the implementation of major frontier scientific industrialization of new energy in the future.
Li Mo: When it comes to the combination of AI and new energy, AI in China is indeed in full swing, and local governments have built a lot of computing centers, but unfortunately most of them are vacant.
The above is a joke, I discussed with my friends whether AI is combined with new energy, but unfortunately there are not too many points of combination, such as used in the manufacturing process, such as for the improvement of wafer capabilities, your detection, and even the ability of the large model to learn offline and further improve independently, which is of course a very good point, but this is the trend of industrial automation and industrial upgrading, not to mention the combination of new energy.
Now Huawei is promoting grid-based energy storage, and in the future, combining AI to make new energy instead of thermal power, which can go further, and the third is to use AI to accelerate the research and development of various new materials in material research and development. I think our investment is along two main lines, one is the information revolution and the other is electrification, and AI and new energy will inevitably converge and promote each other.
Xia Zhongbao: We think that AI must have specific scenarios and applications in the field of new energy, and it is prudent for the industry to introduce new tools or technologies.
Whether it is perovskite materials or other materials just mentioned on the R&D side, they are being simulated with AI technology. For example, on the production side, there are many giants who use AI to replace manual labor to achieve better efficiency and effect, and there are many high-temperature environments in the production process, and the manual detection technology is very limited, and the speed of AI simulation and calculation iteration and the optimization of the production process are very effective. In terms of electricity consumption, the virtual power plant has also mentioned just now that it is better to match your electricity, especially new energy, and better use of electricity, including from the energy storage end and the charging link of new energy vehicles, how to make more effective use of the matching of your charging pile and power supply, and better adapt to the vehicle.
Even autonomous driving is an effective application in the field of new energy vehicles, even a killer application, because only the electrification and electrification of new energy vehicles can truly carry the realization of autonomous driving. From our point of view, we are actively paying attention to specific points, and we also believe that AI can have a better application in the field of new energy in the future.
Xiao Yiting: I have thought about a lot of things today, and I can only share a new application of AI in carbon reduction technology that I just saw today, which is a project we have been looking at recently, and it is also a platform for carbon footprint.
After this platform enters a large amount of supply chain carbon data, it analyzes the weaknesses of supply chain carbon data from this point, because other similar supply chains do not emit so much carbon in this place and this link. So the first step is to analyze your weaknesses, and the second step is to analyze what carbon reduction technology solutions are used by other supply chains in this link, which can be matched with appropriate technical solutions, and can be matched with tools such as finance and carbon credits, which are relatively new AI applications on the carbon reduction solution platform.
We invest more in intelligent driving, and today we mentioned that AI is more popular, and I just mentioned that the supercomputing center needs a lot of green electricity, and I think this is also a big direction in the future, why there will be a lot of entrepreneurial centers in the northwest in the future, mainly because the future computing power will account for half of the I'm not sure, but I'm quite confident that it can account for 20% to 30% of the consumption. We are also very bullish on this. As for the vacancy just mentioned, there have been a lot of autonomous driving companies invested before, and the demand is relatively large.
Xu Xiao: The combination of AI and new energy is nothing more than three kinds, one is to use AI in new energy, the second is to use new energy in AI, and the third is to combine AI and new energy into a new thing that I don't know what kind of new thing it is, which may be beyond the scope of my cognition.
I think that in the entire industrial chain of AI, if AI is the brain and new energy is the blood, it is equivalent to the power source that drives the brain, heart and body. We don't have a special list of new energy tracks internally, we list the energy track internally, and we think that AI will be used in energy beyond AI in new energy.
We can see that a large number of applications of AI are still used in the intelligence and digitization of the power grid, we believe that there is still a very big opportunity, including energy storage on BMS, EMS on the future software iteration will fully apply AI technology, AI itself still takes time, although AI has made fundamental progress, but in essence, it has not departed from the scope of the Turing framework of the year, and it will take a long time to become a human or intelligent thing. If one day AI can become something like a human, maybe the combination of AI and new energy will become a third kind of new thing that I don't know what the hell.
Liu Lin (Moderator): Thank you to all the guests, just now the guests expressed a very professional view, basically think that artificial intelligence technology and the new energy industry have begun to embrace, but there are also guests who feel that the embrace of new energy and artificial intelligence technology is not strong enough, but no matter what, the final statement is that the embrace between the two will become more and more fierce and closer.
In summary, on the one hand, artificial intelligence technology has helped new energy to improve production efficiency, improve energy utilization, and reduce operating costs, on the other hand, the new energy industry has also provided more application scenarios for artificial intelligence technology, which is a perfect integration, and will have a far-reaching and positive impact on economic development in the future.
Thousands of sails on the side of the sinking boat, ten thousand trees in front of the sick tree, this is a sentence that the guests have said a lot in recent days, and the future of new energy must and is still worth looking forward to. This concludes the roundtable dialogue on carbon peaking and carbon neutrality and new energy, thank you.