Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering: The city brain can use 10% of the resources to support the current urban operation

Per reporter: Yang Renfei Per editor: Liu Yanmei

Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and expert in cloud computing technology Image source: Daily Economic News

The data shows that the electricity system accounts for about 40% of the country's carbon emissions. How the power system responds to carbon emission reduction will be an important factor affecting the achievement of the "double carbon" goal. A practical question is, under the dual requirements of economic development and carbon reduction, how to arrange the "rise" and "drop" of electricity consumption?

Today (September 7), at the first China Digital Carbon Neutrality Summit Forum held in Chengdu, Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an expert in cloud computing technology, pointed out that the problem needs to be viewed with a structural perspective.

"In 2020, China's electricity consumption will more than double that of the United States, equivalent to the sum of the United States, Japan and Russia, but in terms of segmentation, in the case of industrial and commercial electricity consumption is much higher than that of the United States, residential electricity consumption is lower than that of the United States." If you compare the electricity consumption per capita, the gap is even greater. This structural dislocation is even more pronounced in the rankings of electricity consumption in the world's major cities he presents: in Berlin, Seoul, London and Paris, residential electricity consumption ranks significantly higher than that of industry and commerce; singapore, Guangzhou, Shanghai and other cities are just the opposite.

"Now there are two important questions, one is how to 'come down' and the other is 'whether to go up'. To achieve structural change, digitalization can play an important role – on the basis of the same electricity consumption, a better quality of life can be achieved. Wang Jian said.

<h2>"Calculate that for every additional 1 kWh of electricity, 10 kWh of electricity consumption is reduced for the world."</h2>

At 2 p.m. on January 6, 2021, City A is in peak parking period. According to the survey data presented by Wang Jian, the remaining 2180 public parking lots that are not full are more impressive than the 355 public parking lots that are in a full state.

Why are so many resources vacant? According to Wang Jian's analysis, one of the reasons is structural misalignment.

"When talking about urban transportation, the number of motor vehicles is often an important indicator, and it is used to judge the matching of transportation resources and the need for construction." He analyzed, "But in fact, there is a clear difference between the number of motor vehicles and the number of urban cars in transit. In a city with 3 million cars, there are only 300,000 cars in transit during peak hours, accounting for only 10% of the total car ownership. ”

Wang Jian pointed out, "There is a 90% and 10% relationship here, and I want to emphasize that the resources needed for 3 million cars and the resources needed for 300,000 cars are completely different for the city." ”

The consumption of electricity is similar.

"A hotel configured at 8 kW/m2 may only use 1.5 kW/m2 of electricity. There is a lot of energy waste, which can be reduced by taking certain measures. And that's what digitalization can do. Wang Jian said.

In fact, the research and practice of digitalization in the past 10 years has confirmed that through digital empowerment, resources and needs will be more accurately matched, and all walks of life will be expected to achieve a larger reduction in energy consumption. He mentioned a "10% rule": as one of the cornerstones of digitalization, in terms of computing, every kilowatt-hour of electricity added in the future should reduce the consumption of about 10 degrees of electricity for the world, which exists in the industry.

And this is done by digitalization at its own lower energy consumption. According to the journal Science, between 2010 and 2018, global computing increased by 550%, while energy use increased by only 6%.

<h2>"The top 100 cities account for 20% of global carbon emissions"</h2>

Since Edison laid the world's first power grid in Manhattan, New York, in the 1880s, global carbon emissions have risen year by year with the spread of electrification. According to the Global Carbon Project and the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, annual global carbon emissions have climbed to 35 billion tonnes by 2019.

Another important role of electrification is to promote the rapid development of the city.

Some data show that cities, while accommodating 54% of the world's total population, consume 70% to 80% of the world's energy. Among them, the head city has become the main source of energy consumption – according to data provided by Wang Jian, with more than 600 cities contributing 60% of the world's GDP, the carbon emissions of the top 100 cities account for about 20% of the global carbon emissions.

While digital participation in the reshaping of the industry and promoting the formation of more energy-efficient production and lifestyles, similar transformations are also needed at the city level.

An example is the construction of urban wisdom brains that many cities in China are promoting. Wang Jian, who has been engaged in urban brain-related work for many years, found that through the construction of the city brain, it is possible to support the operation of the current city with 10% of the resources. One consequence of this could be that carbon emissions, which have risen sharply in the era of electrification, are expected to reverse and decline rapidly in the digital age.

Adding the urban perspective also means that it is necessary to change the past thinking of implementing policies for various fields to achieve carbon emissions, and rearrange the city as a whole and comprehensively study and judge production and life.

"Talking about industrial digitalization today, improving efficiency may be to solve the problems of the industrial side." Wang Jian said, "There should be a question added, that is, how to digitize cities, improve resource efficiency, and solve the problem that the per capita resource consumption of cities in developing countries is much lower than that of developed countries, how to greatly improve people's living standards in the case of carbon neutrality, I think this is a very important content of urban digitalization." ”

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