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Inside China’s smart grid – 1 million km of fibre

Tony Chan | July 9, 2009 | 0 Comments

One of the hottest topics for government’s all over the world is smart grids. Not only are smart grids essential in driving efficiency in the electrical distribution infrastructure in any country, but intelligence inside the grid also means more reliability and protection against surges and outages, better management of generation capacity verse usage demand, and better support for alternative energy sources such as solar and wind, which often have unpredictable generation cycles.

The US alone has earmarked US$3.9 billion on upgrading the grids. Governments in the UK, Australia, and others are also putting a grid upgrade as a critical infrastructure project going forward. But what is the world’s most populous country doing with its grid – where are China’s smart grid initiatives?

The short answer is that the country is still building out its power distribution infrastructure. This release from Frost & Sullivan says that the the State Grid Corp of China (SGCC) recently announced intentions to speed up the construction of the power network in May, which includes the construction of a unified national power grid network.

Having said that, SGCC has also launched a feasibility study on the adoption of smart grid technology. Zhenya Liu, general manager for SGCC told Frost and Sullivan that: “the SGCC is constructing ultra-high and extra-high voltage direct current (+/-800 kV, +/-500 kV) and alternating current transmission systems (1000 kV, 500 kV, 220 kV), and coordinating the development of a smart grid based on information technology and automation technology.”

To give an idea of the scale of the project, SGCC serves 26 Chinese provinces covering some 1.08 billion people.

According to Wang, SGCC has made power grid construction its core business operation for the time being and a strategic objective in the long run. In developing a power grid for the transmission network, SGCC has been deploying several technologies, such as a Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) and an information system integration project.

WAMS uses the phasor measurement unit (PMU), based on the Global Positioning System to develop the stability of power grids. SGCC is building a WAMS and by 2012 plans to have PMU sensors at all generators of 300 MW and above and all substations of 500 kV and above.

The project, when complete, will involve more than 1 million kilometers of fiber linking SGCC’s high voltage substations.

According to Wang, there will be a lot of business opportunities for smart grid–relevant industries, such as smart metering systems, power storage devices, telecommunication devices, and software.

She concludes, “The development speed of smart grids in China depends on these key decision makers of state grid. In the future, the best way to occupy the Chinese smart grid market is to form alliances between several relevant companies and provide a bunch of solutions for the implementation of smart grid in a special area, as General Electric, Cisco Systems, and Silver Springs Networks teamed up to work on the Miami smart-grid in the United States.”

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