With China's return to the market, the development of China's photovoltaic (PV) industry is accelerated. According to statistics of the National Energy Administration, in 2015, China's new PV installed capacity is 15.13 GW and the total PV installed capacity is 43.18 GW, surpassing Germany and ranking at the first place among global PV installed capacity.
As the Internet infrastructure is being improved and related analysis technologies are becoming mature, the "Internet plus" plan has entered a rapid development period and continues to obtain political support. To improve the share of renewable energy, promote clean and efficient use of fossil energy, and accelerate energy market opening and industry upgrading, the National Development and Reform Commission, National Energy Administration, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the Guidance on Promoting "Internet Plus" Smart Energy Development (hereinafter referred to as "the Guidance") recently.
The Guidance focuses on the following aspects: promote renewable energy production intelligence, encourage the construction of smart wind farms, smart PV power plants, and Internet-based smart cloud platforms, to achieve intelligent renewable energy production; promote the joint development of centralized and distributed energy storage, and promote the deployment of energy storage power plants of an appropriate scale at the centralized new energy plant bases, to achieve collaborative and optimized operations among the energy storage systems, new energy systems, and grids; accelerate the energy consumption intelligence, strengthen the management on the electric power demanding side, popularize intelligent energy consumption monitoring and diagnosis technologies, accelerate the construction of energy management centers of industrial enterprises, and construct Internet-based information service platforms. The Guidance indicates the official debut of "Internet plus", which was proposed in 2015, in the energy industry. Of the same origin as the "Internet +" trend, the "Smart PV" concept once again attracts public attention.
"Smart PV" is an innovation crossing the PV power generation and information technology fields. The innovative product of "Smart PV" is the smart PV power plant. The whole process of the PV power plant deployment, from the construction to O&M, is optimized and innovated. Digital information technologies, Internet technologies, and PV technologies are converged to optimize initial investment, lower O&M costs, improve the electric energy yield, and increase the return on investment (ROI). The smart PV power plant is applicable to various complex scenarios such as large-scale surface power plants, power plants in mountainous areas, Photovoltaic Agriculture, and Photovoltaic Fishery.
1、 Definition of the PV Power Plant
Intelligence means a reduction of manual intervention and implementation of fully automated operation. An intelligent system can automatically discover, diagnose, and rectify faults, thereby improving the electric energy yield, lowering O&M costs, and increasing system revenues.
