Cloud Story | "Electricity" Brightens Digital Life, Alibaba Cloud Helps Southern Power Grid Smart Dispatching

Introduction to will select the world's most power-hungry city, and Las Vegas is the non-gaming city. Speaking of this name, the first thing that people think of is the entertainment life of drunken gold fans and sung songs every night. The power consumption caused by this is also quite alarming. In order to support the huge tourist facilities, the peak electricity consumption of the casino exceeds that of the whole of Turkey, and the electricity consumption per night is equal to that of Singapore throughout the year. To this end, the Las Vegas government has promoted an energy-saving and power-saving program since 2008, using renewable energy to power public facilities. But even so, the total amount of electricity consumption is still very alarming, and the per capita electricity consumption alone is 30 times that of Beijing. But from another level, the consumption of electricity just reflects the degree of modernization of the city.

To select the world's most power-hungry city, Las Vegas is the non-gaming city.

Speaking of this name, the first thing that people think of is the entertainment life of drunken gold fans and sung songs every night. Here are the Paris Hotel with a French style from the inside to the outside, the Bellagio fountain that moves with music, the magnificent and realistic pyramids and sphinxes, as well as the Statue of Liberty and a miniature of the Empire State Building. And more importantly, the streets are full of feasting and flamboyant...

The power consumption caused by this is also quite alarming. In order to support the huge tourist facilities, the peak electricity consumption of the casino exceeds that of the whole of Turkey, and the electricity consumption per night is equal to that of Singapore throughout the year. To this end, the Las Vegas government has promoted an energy-saving and power-saving program since 2008, using renewable energy to power public facilities. But even so, the total amount of electricity consumption is still very alarming, and the per capita electricity consumption alone is 30 times that of Beijing.

But from another level, the consumption of electricity just reflects the degree of modernization of the city. Many years ago, NASA's global night scene map was popular on the Internet, and it also showed the development level of different countries and regions from the side. As far as China is concerned, the night view of the southeast coast is quite brilliant, especially the Pearl River Delta.

The department responsible for power supply in the Pearl River Delta is China Southern Power Grid Co., Ltd., which is what we often call Southern Power Grid. Among them, the China Southern Power Grid Electric Power Dispatching Control Center (hereinafter referred to as the Southern Power Grid General Commissioner) is a subsidiary of China Southern Power Grid, and represents the company's exercise of dispatching power during the operation of the Southern Power Grid. In other words, the China Southern Power Grid is the highest dispatching and command organization for the operation of the Southern Power Grid. The regulatory area covers 5 provinces (autonomous regions) of Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hainan, with a power supply area of 1 million square kilometers and a power supply population of over 250 million. The power supply load exceeds 190 million kilowatts.

Such a huge coverage and such an important regional location increase the work pressure of the China Southern Power Grid. It not only shoulders the power supply of China's most prosperous area, but is also the "source power" for the economic development of China's economy, especially the Pearl River Delta. However, in reality, the work of the China Southern Power Grid is not easy. The traditional centralized computing architecture design makes the power supply load pressure concentrated on individual nodes, which seriously affects the reliability of the system, just like the "Sword of Damocles" hanging over the head of the power grid. ", and a prominent problem of the centralized architecture is that the platform has poor scalability, system upgrades and expansions are extremely difficult, and a lot of manpower and material resources are required.

The problem at the architectural level is only part of the problem. The deeper reason is that with the development of digitalization, the chief surveyor of China Southern Networks found it difficult to keep up with the evolution of the times. In the past ten years of operation, China Southern Network's chief surveyor has accumulated massive amounts of real-time operating data and management data. However, limited by traditional computing capabilities, methods and data confidentiality requirements, these scheduling data are difficult to exert value and can only be stored In the disk, space is taken up in vain, which also creates pressure for data maintenance. In contrast, the best way is to migrate these data to the cloud, and then rely on intelligent data management and AI middle station to make the data play its value both externally and internally.

But such a transformation is not easy. We know that the power grid system is a major event related to the national economy and the people’s livelihood. As the so-called, it affects the whole body. Any problems or slight mistakes in the transformation process will have a huge impact and cause immeasurable losses to the production and life of the people. . For this reason, based on the reason of "bold hypothesis and careful verification", the technical team represented by Hu Rong, the senior manager of the Automation Division of the Power Dispatching Control Center of China Southern Power Grid, and the professor-level senior engineer, finally chose Alibaba Cloud Hybrid after repeated investigations and demonstrations. Cloud to build your own intelligent power dispatching cloud.

Many people may not understand the role and value of power dispatch, but in the industry, dispatch is regarded as the brain of the power system and the command body for grid operation management, switching operations, and incident handling. As the executor of the "brain", every dispatcher is the direct commander who guarantees the safe operation, stable operation and economic operation of the power grid. In the operation of the power grid, any irregular behavior may affect the safety and stable operation of the power grid, and even cause major accidents.

It is precisely because of the importance of power dispatch that dispatch engineers are under tremendous pressure, and Hu Rong's team is more looking forward to intelligence and AI in the middle of the station. As the leader of the domestic cloud platform, Alibaba Cloud has the industry's top technology cloud platform and cloud services, and the annual double 11 "big exam" also proves the stability and robustness of Alibaba Cloud's system architecture and its technological leadership It is very suitable for power dispatching. It was under such an opportunity that the two parties hit it off and opened a new chapter in intelligent power dispatch.

China Southern Net has always adopted a traditional centralized architecture, which is very cumbersome in both operation and management. It does not include account management, resource allocation, and even back-end monitoring and maintenance. It also requires multiple people to collaborate to complete, causing a lot of problems. Facilitate waste.

After gaining insight into the needs of the China Southern Network's general survey, the engineers of the Alibaba Cloud team started from the technical level, first identified the problems and pain points of the original centralized architecture, and put forward a distributed solution that takes into account both performance and security according to local conditions. , Unified management and recombination of the original account classification, operation and maintenance management, realized the transformation from a centralized architecture to a distributed architecture, replaced the traditional "chimney" design with digital and intelligent, after unremitting efforts And optimization, Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud, from the "knowledge" of application pain points to the "action" of solutions, enables the power dispatch system to inspire powerful energy.

After updating to the Alibaba Cloud platform, with the help of a newly designed power dispatch cloud with a multi-regional architecture, the China Southern Power Grid has realized the power industry's first dispatch automation system basic platform based entirely on new Internet technologies: unified account authority management, unified Many features such as resource monitoring and scheduling, hierarchical operation and maintenance realize the decoupling of software and hardware, and solve the problem of traditional system load concentration and application limited by the performance of a single server.

Science and technology are productivity. In today's intelligent age, computing power is also productivity. Through the transformation of Alibaba Cloud, China Southern Commissioner developed the industry’s first second-level expanded computing resources and plug-and-play cloud-based SCADA system based on cloud-native technology, which greatly reduced the corresponding time of the original system and improved the operating efficiency of the system. It reduces the management difficulty of operation and maintenance personnel, and realizes many features such as processing more than 60,000 messages per second, one-click deployment of the whole system in 70 seconds, and rapid capacity expansion in 10 seconds.

"The project that we built together with Alibaba Cloud Hybrid Cloud has been appraised by the Chinese Society of Electrical Engineering and has reached the international leading level. Based on the large-scale computing power of the dispatch cloud, the comprehensive defense security check calculations have increased from more than 1 hour before the original. Reduced to 10 minutes. The China Southern Power Grid's main grid-level data center has covered all more than 7,000 plants and stations of 35kV and above in China Southern Power Grid, with more than 3 million real-time data points. It is currently being connected to a million-level power distribution site. Real-time data processing is expected. The ability reaches tens of millions," Hu Rong said excitedly when talking about the advantages of the new system.

Relying on the power dispatch cloud built by Alibaba Cloud, China Southern Power Grid launched the "power spot trading" system in just three months. On May 21, 2019, China Southern Power Grid realized the country's first power spot transaction settlement, setting a record in the industry. The newly created AI dispatch platform of the China Southern Power Grid has also been officially put into use. With the help of various cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and deep learning, the AI scheduling platform can quickly generate data samples and quickly implement algorithm iterations. The accuracy of AI algorithms for grid load forecasting is as high as 97%, exceeding the level of manual forecasting.

In September 2019, China Southern Power Grid and the Society of Electrical Engineering jointly held the first power dispatch AI competition in the entire network to explore the path of deep integration of artificial intelligence technology and traditional power grid business. The competition hopes to use AI's accurate electricity forecast to make the construction investment of distribution and sale of electricity and the layout of the grid structure more reasonable. One is to save the budget for the enterprise, and the other is to realize the intelligent energy management of multi-energy complementary.

In the early days of the development of cloud computing, we often compared the cloud to "hydropower", but in fact, the development of digitization, intelligence, or any other technology is inseparable from sufficient power support. It can even be said that the basis of digitalization is the intelligent power dispatching. Only in this way can the full supply of power be realized, and enterprises can also avoid worries on the road of digital transformation and move forward lightly.

As Hu Rong emphasized at this Alibaba Cloud Conference-today’s world is undergoing a digital economic revolution, and the structural form and system characteristics of the power system are also undergoing major changes. Power grid companies should actively learn from the Internet such as Alibaba Cloud. The company’s successful digital transformation experience, build an energy ecological digital operation platform, integrate open industry service capabilities, lower industry entry barriers, guide and serve social funds and diversified market players, promote high-quality development of the industry ecology, and continuously enrich high-frequency service scenarios , To meet the energy and power needs of the people for a better life.

Copyright Notice: content of this article is contributed spontaneously by Alibaba Cloud real-name registered users. The copyright belongs to the original author. The Alibaba Cloud Developer Community does not own its copyright and does not assume corresponding legal responsibilities. For specific rules, please refer to the "Alibaba Cloud Developer Community User Service Agreement" and the "Alibaba Cloud Developer Community Intellectual Property Protection Guidelines". If you find suspected plagiarism in this community, fill in the infringement complaint form to report it. Once verified, the community will immediately delete the suspected infringing content.