Introduction: Once Energy Storage technology gets a breakthrough, chip technology is likely to be applied to the energy network, and the energy industry is also likely to find its own Moore's Law
As the dual carbon target has become more and more the consensus of the whole society, the discussion on how to achieve the dual carbon target has gradually shifted from the pragmatic and conceptual level to the practical and technical level. In this process, several basic consensuses are gradually formed: 1. Electricity will be the most important form of energy in the zero-carbon society in the future; 2. The proportion of low-carbon energy represented by wind and light needs to be greatly increased; 3. The efficiency of energy production, transmission and use should be continuously improved; 4. Energy consumption needs to be controlled, but carbon reduction is not equal to energy reduction, and energy costs should continue to be reduced; 5. The digitalization of energy networks is essential.
These basic understandings are easy to understand, but achieving them is as easy as putting an elephant in a refrigerator as opening the door, stuffing it, and closing the door. Many scholars and scientists have also proposed a variety of possible paths to dual carbon targets.
In chip design solutions for leading the company's new technology (Synopsys), senior vice President of global, the new China, chairman and CEO GeQun, chip design field for many years the accumulation of energy consumption management, digital modeling ability is copied to the energy sector, "Moore's law", to look for the energy industry not only provides the acceleration for the energy industry structure change, It will also give a huge boost to the achievement of the dual carbon goal.
Chip and double carbon, seems to be limited correlation. But the underlying logic of the dual carbon goal is to produce energy more cleanly, transmit it more efficiently and use it smarter. And that's what chip design has been doing for decades. Ge qun made an analogy, "a chip is a collection of billions, tens of billions of transistors, a transistor is equivalent to an electricity unit, a chip is equivalent to a large scale energy network. In fact, the power consumption model of a transistor is more complex than that of a real home. Now we are optimizing the energy consumption per transistor, and the same capability can be used in the future for energy networks, but in watts and kilowatts instead of microwatts."
There are still a number of technical hurdles to overcome in order to achieve this capability transfer, but from the perspective of basic models, energy networks and chip design do have many convergence points, which can be inspired and learned from chip technology.
Carbon reduction is not equal to energy reduction
When the dual carbon target was first proposed, many people understood it as an environmental measure. In fact, the dual carbon target is far greater than the green target, which usually costs extra to achieve better performance, and the former, which gives people unlimited access to cheaper clean energy. If carbon control is simply equated with restricting the production of high-carbon energy, problems such as sport-driven carbon reduction will surely arise, which will have a huge negative impact on human life and production. Although the causes of the European energy crisis and China's power rationing in the past year are complex, the impact of radical carbon reduction measures cannot be avoided.
In the history of civilization, progress in human society means more energy consumption. Natural fuels were used in primitive society, wood was used in agricultural society, coal was used in early industrial society, and oil and natural gas were used in mature industrial society. The starting point of each great leap of human society was the change of energy form. The zero-carbon society of the future will also require newer forms of energy to meet more of its energy needs, and this cannot be achieved by restricting the production and use of high-carbon energy sources alone.
To achieve this goal, there are two feasible paths. One is to accelerate the reshaping of energy structure, reduce the proportion of high carbon energy and increase the proportion of low carbon energy. Second, improve energy efficiency and achieve zero-carbon electricity.
Switching the energy source to electric energy is the only way in the current state of technology. Because only electricity comes from multiple sources, only electricity can be configured and controlled precisely, and only electricity can be directly produced using zero-carbon methods. But achieving zero-carbon electricity will be harder than you think. Europe's energy crisis, China's blackouts and the Texas blackout all prove that we are a long way from energy freedom. On the road to energy freedom, technological challenges such as renewable energy generation, energy storage and energy network digitization await mankind.
Synsys looked deeply into the entire energy digitization path and determined that the highest priority of these technological challenges, with the greatest impact on the entire energy network, is energy storage.
Energy storage: the two pillars of a zero-carbon society
There is a lot of talk about the digitisation of the energy network, and it is acknowledged that digitisation is a prerequisite for achieving zero carbon because it is the only way to achieve accurate control and efficient use of energy. However, in the current energy network, the application of digital technology is fragmented. Many Internet of Things technologies and intelligent control technologies are widely used in power generation, transmission and electrical equipment, but the digitalization degree of the entire energy network is not high. The most important bottleneck lies in the lack of intelligent energy storage, an important link in the current energy network.
How important is energy storage to digitizing the entire energy network? It's the equivalent of data storage on a chip. Data production, data transmission, data storage and data consumption as an integral, now chip as the core of digital system, the data storage capacity, speed, safety is the precondition of any computing tasks implemented, and it is of high capacity, high speed and high reliable data storage, to support the current complex digital applications.
Conventional power grids have almost no energy storage capacity. A grid that only produces, transmits and consumes electricity is like an analog chip that only produces, transmits and consumes data. It can only do simple tasks like a handheld calculator, but it can hardly handle any intelligent applications. Intelligent operation is an important feature of the next generation energy network. To achieve this, more advanced energy storage is needed. If energy storage is the short board of the whole system, it is difficult to carry out effective network intelligent optimization, and the digitalization of energy network cannot be really landed.
Ge qun said, "Energy storage is the equivalent of the digital energy network, without the capacity of energy storage, no matter how advanced the energy consumption model can be put to good use."
Lithium Batteries are also a mistake. Lithium-ion batteries are well placed to power the "last mile" of energy networks. However, for large-scale energy networks, Lithium Battery is not the best way to store energy, because of its high safety risk, short cycle life, poor environmental adaptability and high energy storage cost.
Energy storage technology is very diverse, several energy storage technology experts told Financial Eleven. Mature technologies include pumped storage, compressed air energy storage, flywheel energy storage, lead battery and so on. More mature technology has lithium battery, liquid flow battery, super capacitor and so on. In addition, there are fuel cells, thermal energy storage, molten salt batteries and so on. Different energy storage technologies have different response times and application scenarios.
At present, the lack of energy storage investment is improving. For example, the energy storage products used in the Beijing Winter Olympic Games to ensure electric power is one of the liquid flow batteries. The technical characteristics of this kind of battery have better adaptability to grid-level energy storage and grid connection of wind energy.
In the future development of energy storage technology, the experience of chip development is worth learning. In the development of chips, data storage is inherently diverse, from multi-level caches inside chips to memory, solid-state drives, mechanical drives, and magnetic tape, a seemingly old technology, is still alive and well. Because data storage needs vary, each storage technology has its own optimal application scenario. In the development of energy storage technology, the same way should be followed, energy storage is absolutely not equal to lithium batteries, and even energy storage is not equal to batteries. Even pumped storage, an ancient form of energy storage, could play a bigger role in digitizing energy networks.
What conditions should energy storage technology meet in future energy network? Ge qun proposed four standards: extremely safe, easily accessible, digital and large capacity.
Extremely safe and easy to understand, safety is the premise of grid-level energy storage technology, the scale of grid-level energy storage is large, high energy, once the safety problems, the consequences are unimaginable. According to incomplete statistics, in 2021 alone, China, South Korea, Australia and the United States had nearly 10 accidents involving energy storage power plants, some of which burned for several days or even exploded. All of these warn the energy storage field that safety is the first priority. Under the existing technology, the safety of lithium battery in the energy storage scenario is worrying.
Accessibility hasn't been discussed much in previous discussions of energy storage technology, but it's actually very important. According to the current judgment of the future energy network, the scale of energy storage will be astronomical, and the demand for raw materials is also huge. If the raw materials required by energy storage technology are not easy to obtain, the implementation of energy storage technology will be impossible. The lithium resources needed for lithium batteries are limited, and Chinese companies mainly rely on imports. The price of lithium carbonate has jumped tenfold in the past year.
Easy access has another meaning, that is, energy storage technology is easy to obtain, easy to industrialize, adapt to a variety of environments, can be widely deployed. The convenience of energy storage technology deployment directly determines the depth of energy network digitization. Only energy storage technology can be deployed forward and close to users, can the operation space of energy network digitization be expanded and benefit more users.
Digital level is the intergenerational marker of energy storage technology. With the support of digital capability, traditional and mature energy storage technologies such as pumped storage power station and flywheel energy storage can also contribute to the future energy network and play a greater role.
Large capacity is easier to understand. In the case of computers, who doesn't want as much memory as possible, as much hard disk as possible, as much storage capacity as possible. Similarly, in energy network, the larger the capacity of energy storage, the larger the optimization space of energy network. The limit is cost, including the cost of the storage technology and the product itself, as well as surrounding costs such as the land involved in deploying the storage.
In the chip field, the continuous evolution of technology can not only improve the performance, but also achieve the cost of "half every 18 months". It is believed that with the continuous development of energy storage technology, the energy industry will also find its own "Moore's Law", although its development rate will not be exactly the same as that of the semiconductor industry. But it can guide all relevant parties in the industry towards the same goal.
Energy storage technology has become an important field in the world technology competition. On February 7, 2022, the White House released the American innovation technology and the national security, national security council and the national science and technology commission launched the latest version of the list of key and emerging technology (CET), five new technology, new including renewable energy generation and energy storage technology, the future will be strictly limited to export the technology.
In the "14th Five-year Plan for New Energy Storage Development" recently issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, it is clear that by 2025, new energy storage will step into the stage of large-scale development and meet the conditions for large-scale commercial application. In 2030, new energy storage will be fully marketized. It can be seen that policy, market and technology have reached a consensus that diversified energy storage is an important infrastructure for energy network digitization. What is the potential for energy networks to explode once the infrastructure problem is solved?
Exploring "Moore's Law" for energy
People in the science and technology circles are very familiar with Moore's Law. In recent years, the failure of Moore's Law has been mentioned again and again, and has been proved false again and again. Today, Moore's Law is still effective in the chip field, and the whole chip industry chain is working hard to continue Moore's Law, which makes the chip performance continue to improve.
After the breakthrough of energy storage technology and the successful industrialization reduce the cost of energy storage system, will the influence brought by the digitalization of energy network be similar to Moore's Law, with the proportion of zero-carbon energy constantly doubling and the energy price constantly decreasing? It's a nice aspiration, and it's theoretically possible. Some experts point out that before the price rise of raw materials, the cost per kilowatt hour of the life cycle of lithium batteries is about 0.5 yuan to 0.6 yuan. In the future, after more energy storage technologies are comprehensively breakthrough and marketized successfully, the cost per kilowatt hour can be controlled at 0.3 yuan to 0.4 yuan or even lower.
New technology of technical experts chose energy network as the extension of digital power direction, because once they found that the energy storage technology development, new technology accumulated over a long period of time in the field of chip modeling, operation and optimization ability, can quickly reuse in energy network, improve energy efficiency, increase the cheap energy accounted for, Achieve a sustained reduction in energy costs.
New technology has been with many large power generation, power transmission and transformation enterprises digitize cooperation, completed the power generation, transmission and power link during the period of modeling, but because of the lack of energy storage capacity, all energy must use, namely model almost impossible to optimize, can only look at a lot of equipment in the condition of the efficient, energy network digital cannot truly implemented.
That's why one of the leading chip companies is focusing on the importance of energy storage. Ge Qun stressed that only when the four conditions of source, network, charge and storage are available, can the digital energy network be in a complete state and the accelerator effect of Moore's Law be opened in the energy network.
