In the beginning of 2016, when the industry was expecting Huawei's initiatives in inverters or monitoring and O&M, they already shifted their focus to the entire PV industry chain.
Back to March, 2015, on a conference held by HUANGHE Hydropower to demonstrate the achievements of their smart PV power plants, O&M experts from Huawei commanded field O&M workers at Laxiwa PV power plant, situated over 300 km from the venue, to locate the faulty array and clear the stains on the surface that impact the yield. Their performance deeply impressed a group of Japanese guests presented in the conference.
Two months later, Huawei and Pairiesun jointly launched a more influential campaign in Inner Mongolia, which attracted a dozen of Japanese clients to attend the activity by transferring from Beijing.
In January this year, Huawei invited a delegation of nearly 1,000 PV partners to visit their headquarters and pilot base in Shenzhen.
Managerial staff from the Smart PV department of Huawei explained that "every year Huawei will invite hundreds of groups of clients to visit plants or our headquarters, witnessing our performance in PV power plants in different areas of China. Over ten groups of Japanese clients were invited within last year."
Being mysterious and almost closed for foreign PV manufacturers, the Japanese market is always regarded as a huge but hard-to-conquer desert for non-local providers. Nevertheless, Huawei successfully shipped nearly 500 megawatts (MW) PV inverters to Japan in 2015, ranking first among Chinese PV providers in the Japanese market.
Why Japanese companies favor Huawei?
Most PV modules in Japan are harnessed with a capacity lower than 20 MW. At present, single-unit PV modules with over 100 MW are rarely seen other than in China and the US. In the ongoing construction of a 2GW PV plant in Ningxia, CMNE adopts Huawei's holistic smart PV solution.
"Foreign clients were surprised to see a PV power plant with such a huge capacity," Solarbe reporters were told by Huawei managerial staff, "Nowadays monitoring systems are widely used in overseas PV markets. However, due to their capacity restrictions, the PV modules in many countries and regions are still using primitive troubleshooting methods rather than smart O&M systems. Adopting smart O&M can help improve the O&M efficiency by at least 50%." The boost of PV installations imposes great challenges on traditional O&M methods. Many power plants are confronted with the same O&M problems once occurring in China, that is, staff shortage and low efficiency.
Mr. Tian, Chief Engineer of Pairiesun once complained that "because of the boring life in those remote areas, it's hard for the company to keep experienced O&M employees. They would soon be poached by other companies by promise of high salary. At present, we need to spend over 20,000RMB a month to secure an experienced power plant head." Although such a salary is already much higher than the level of many big cities, the company is still facing the shortage of O&M staff.
The PV industry experiences rapid growth in Japan, the US, and India in recent years. Staff shortage will also become one of their obstacles. To address this challenge, smart O&M solutions serve as their best choices.
After years of development, China's PV industry leads the world in both scale and technology in construction of PV power plants. Even then, many Chinese PV providers still find that exploring overseas PV markets is an intractable task.
Take Japanese market as an example. The appliance market in Japan is dominated by several super companies such as Panasonic and Mitsubishi. These companies are not that professional in the PV manufacturing industry and usually provide holistic solutions for end users. In this case, the part suppliers who can offer more services will certainly win their favors.
Join the "Social Network" of Japanese Top 10 Electric Companies
In the first year of entering the PV industry, Huawei focused more on the quality and performance of PV inverters, which they termed as "Smart PV 1.0". In the beginning of 2015, Huawei introduced the smart O&M system FusionSolar to expand their service offerings to include the monitoring and O&M of PV modules. This year, a "new arrival" – Smart PV 3.0 is launched to aim at forging a comprehensive industry chain of smart PV by integrating different units. "When planning a PV installation, clients are more willing to be faced with a holistic solution, rather than the overwhelming task of selecting and assembling various components like inverters and supports," commented the Huawei manager.
Such a perception won high appreciation of Japanese companies. Japan's second largest real estate company, Daiwahouse, has constructed a series of energy-saving buildings using Huawei's smart PV solutions and inverters. Many tier-one Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi, Kyocera, West Holdings, and PowerMax have established partnerships with Huawei. Cooperating with Huawei, ZNSHINE Solar is expanding their business successfully in Japan. On the PV Expo held in Tokyo this year, several Chinese PV providers promote their domestic or commercial rooftop PV solutions to overseas clients, among which most are cooperating with Huawei in provision of inverters and O&M.
So far, Huawei has started cooperation and pilot cases with all top 10 electric companies in Japan. Huawei thinks highly of these partnerships: "Japan has the strictest standards for grid connection in the world. They have high requirements on buildings, such as earthquake-proofing air conditioners. We have to satisfy these requirements when deploying domestic and commercial rooftop PV systems. We are fully prepared." For instance, in a bidding for an onshore PV power plant which was required to stand with salt mist corrosion, only Huawei passed all the three tests of JET.
This may perfectly explain why Huawei can infiltrate into the Japanese market.
Enhancements to Address the Japanese Market
Huawei primarily promotes 40 kW and 33 kW PV inverters in the Japanese market. Upgrading from 3 maximum power point tracking (MPPT) to 4 MPPT and abandoning traditional RS485 for communication, their newly launched products adopt Power Line Communication (PLC) to ensure reliable communication and significantly increase the efficiency in construction and O&M of power plants.
PV system installation continues to boost in Japan and the Japanese government is trying to reduce the high costs for connecting the increasing number of solar systems to the national grid. Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) confirms the plan of a 20-year feed-in tariff reduction by 11% from April 1 this year. The feed-in tariff for solar PV arrays over 10 kW is reduced from 27 yen/kWh to 24 yen/kWh. However, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), solar installations in Japan will reach 14.3 GW in 2016, creating a new record in solar deployment.
"Adopting Huawei's smart PV solution can help customers save 5% initial investment and increase yield by 5%. The reduction of tariff is good news for us. These two figures represent the reasons for Japanese clients choosing Huawei as their partner," supplemented by the managerial staff from Huawei.
FR:Shine Magazine
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