FINAL WORD
How AI is transforming
the solar energy
industry
Robin Zhu, Head of Smart PV Business in the Middle East, Huawei,
outlines some emerging trends for the smart solar industry for
2025 and introduces Huawei’s latest FusionSolar 6.0+ solution.
With the rapid development of ICT
technologies such as AI, cloud,
Big Data and 5G, Huawei has
engaged with experts in the field and has
released 10 emerging technical trends for
solar energy and smart PV for 2025.
Full intelligence: In the future, data will
become the most fundamental resource for
the digital world and all data in the PV plant
from modules, trackers and inverters will be
detected. We expect 90% of PV plants will
be fully digitalised by 2025.
This mass data will be processed with AI to
help improve system operation efficiency,
previously performed solely by human
experience. We expect AI to be deployed in
system design optimisation for detection,
solar storage collaboration and ultimately
to make the whole system smarter. By
2025, 70% of PV plants will adopt AI.
We believe unmanned operation and
maintenance will be mainstream. Drones will
be deployed for inspections and assistant
robots will be able to help repair and replace
devices with remote control. We expect by
2025, 80% of the PV plants will be unmanned
at least with light manual operation.
Grid supporting: Currently the installation
capacity of renewable energy accounts
for 10% of the total power plants where
energy generation accounts for only 2%
at this moment. In the future, renewable
energy will become the main energy source
as significantly more PV plants will be
connected to the power grid. Therefore, we
expect PV plants to transform from following
the grid to actively supporting the grid.
When the grid integration failure occurs,
the PV plant should not be tripped and the
output power should be stable with low
harmonics in order to maintain the voltage
and the frequency of the grid.
The PV plant storage is expected to be a new
trend for grid supporting. In 2025, we expect
30% of new PV plants will have energy
storage. However, the smart collaboration
between the solar and the storage to
improve the system efficiency will be another
new project for the PV solution suppliers.
Also, 80% of residential systems will
connect to virtual power plants (VPP)
networks by 2025.
System and the components upgrade:
With the development of the material and
heat dissipation and algorithm, we expect
components in PV solutions will be upgraded
in three ways.
First will be modular design of components for
flexible deployment. Second is power density
– in the future, inverter power density will
increase by 50%. Lastly, we will see reliability,
availability, security, safety, resilience and
privacy become essential requirements.
Based on these understandings, Huawei
created FusionSolar 6.0+ Utility Smart PV.
The solution consists of smart inverters,
a controller for the data transmission
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