Interview | TBEA Xinjiang Sunoasis: Opening up the Whole Life Cycle Management of Smart Power Statio

With the advent of the digital age, AI, block chain, cloud computing and other technologies have found wide application in increasing number of fields.

At the just-concluded SNEC 14th (2020) International Photovoltaic Power Generation and Smart Energy Exhibition & Conference, TBEA Sunoasis, as the co-organizer of the forum at terawatt level over years, exhibited the 1,500V string type and centralized intelligent PV (photovoltaic) power generation solutions, power quality solution, intelligent microgrid solution, TB-eCloud intelligent operation and maintenance solution, intelligent brand new wind farm solution and a series of intelligent energy solutions integrating multiple digital technologies such as AI and cloud computing, etc., as well as a whole new generation of TS228KTL-HV string inverter, energy storage converter PCS and TC3125KF centralized inverter and many other intelligent products in the affordable era. 

From equipment intelligence to power station intelligence Creating Different AI 

In the PV industry, numerous enterprises are attempting to apply digital technologies such as AI and cloud computing, etc. in inverters, components and other single equipment so as to improve power generation efficiency, out of which TBEA Sunoasis's AI technology is completely different. "The AI application of TBEA Sunoasis is focused on the entire power station, entire region and entire group instead of a single device or a single link" Xu Bofeng, deputy general manager of TBEA Sunoasis, said in an interview with the reporter from Century New Energy Network that presently the intelligent O&M (operation and maintenance) in the market is more inclined to standardize the O&M specifications of power stations and to intelligentize such links as operation and inspection, maintenance, safety and quality supervision. However, the intelligent O&M to be done by TBEA Sunoasis is to open up the channel between people, between people and equipment and between equipment and equipment, rather than simple intelligentized equipment. "Take the dust accumulation in power stations as an example. The dust accumulation in PV panels would definitely affect the power generation efficiency. According to common sense, the dust accumulation, if any, must be cleaned. However, if the weather forecast system in the O&M platform knows about in advance an 80%+ probability of heavy rain in the next day, could the cleaning work be properly postponed? Now for granted, even if it doesn't rain the next day, when and how to clean should be considered anyway." Xu Bofeng said that if the dust accumulation in the power station is "point", then the power station where the dust is accumulated is "line" and all the power stations in the area where that power station is located are "plane". What TBEA Sunoasis is doing with AI technology is to connect the "point" into "line" and the "line" into "plane" so as to reduce the kilowatt-hour cost of the power station as a whole by means of whole life cycle O&M. Power stations in coal mines, mountains, water surface, desert... Different power stations have different characteristics. Facing increasingly complex development environment and power generation system, increasingly low tariff and increasing data and information, apparently the traditional design ideas can not meet the complex design requirements. Relying on twenty years of experience in development, construction, operation and management of PV, wind power and power transmission and transformation projects and based on the main business as well as current condition and future development trend of the company and industry, a set of digital system platform aiming at the whole life cycle of projects has been built up from such nine aspects as project macro siting, resource assessment, micro siting, economic assessment, project design, project construction, project construction management, project O&M and project optimization & improvement. The platform has one central platform, three supports, four major sectors and five platforms: one central platform refers to the new energy industry Internet platform (TB-eCloud), which is the platform support for new energy coordination, co-construction, sharing and capability precipitation, and the core of material connection, data analysis, capability sharing and application development. The three supports are to take the construction of digital culture, digital talents and digital organizations as important guarantee mechanisms for digitalization and consolidate the management foundation. The four major business sectors take digital wind/PV field operation, intelligent manufacturing, engineering services and integrated energy management as the main fields of current digitalization to create corresponding SAAS application platforms. In the aspect of management informatization, an end-to-end "business line solution" is built with elaborated concept. The five platforms refer to digital engineering design, digital engineering service, intelligent wind and solar farm, comprehensive energy and intelligent equipment management platform. 

Powerful intelligent system supports Double-end integration to secure revenue of power station revenue. 

It is understood that the platform has been fully applied in the resource assessment and design process of numerous PV and wind power projects. For example, the new energy intelligent PV solution of TBEA Sunoasis based on this platform, with TS228KTL-HV high-power series inverter as the core, can realize double-end data fusion from cloud to station: cloud provides TB-eCloud PV power station intelligent O&M system and TB-eCloud mobile operation APP to help integrate resources; the station end provides an intelligent PV monitoring system and an intelligent PV analysis system, which form visual reports through power station index analysis, health analysis and equipment operation analysis to provide strong support for decision-making at all levels. TBEA Sunoasis's intelligent PV solution integrates a new generation of IV curve detection technology. At IV curve scanning stage, the speed is 20% higher than that of the conventional scanning method. The scanned IV data is transmitted to the background through high-speed PLC + optical ring network for IV curve analysis. With the help of the powerful computing power of TB-eCloud cloud platform, the characteristic parameters of the group string are calculated and analyzed, which can diagnose the fault type of IV curve from the database in the shortest possible time, and finally provide customers with a high-precision, visual and low-cost station-level maintenance solution, greatly improving the "O&M accuracy of PV power stations". Moreover, while realizing accurate operation and maintenance, the data channel between the inverter, the tracking bracket, the communication box and the PV area monitoring system is also opened up. With intelligent inverter integrated tracking support communication, the branch MPPT is matched with the connected tracker, and the dynamic fuzzy algorithm is adopted to actively adjust the tracker of the corresponding branch, so as to achieve accurate control without false projections, avoid the inaccurate intelligentization of group regulation and group control and maximize output of power generation of each branch, inverter and array, making the power station revenue more refined. 

Opening up intelligent channel Achieving higher performance 

The construction of the digital system platform has opened up a real-time sharing channel for power station application data and information flow in various industrial sectors, and has also helped performances of TBEA Sunoasis to soar. According to statistics, the global shipments of new energy inverters by TBEA Sunoasis have exceeded 30GW, and the number of wind and PV power stations has exceeded 5,000. In the "2019 Top 500 Global New Energy Enterprises List", TBEA Sunoasis rose 8 places to 89th. The year 2020 is the 20th year of TBEA's expansion in the field of new energy and also an important year for TBEA Sunoasis's strategy giving top priority to both wind and PV power . According to Xu Bofeng, in the coming days, in order to conform to the changing trend of the times, the company will join hands with all partners in the ecosystem to innovate business cooperation modes, jointly explore and expand ecological content and value space such as green finance, energy trading, energy efficiency management, smart power stations, smart energy equipment, industry cloud, etc., and lead the wind power and PV industries into a new era of affordable power grid access.