Overview
The China Three Gorges Corporation Group (CTGCG) is the largest clean energy organization in China to this day, a leader in the clean energy industry for years. And it shows: being active in developing onshore wind power, photovoltaic power generation, hydropower, geothermal energy, tidal energy, and wind-powered hydrogen production. The scope at which CTGCG implements new innovative energy business strategies is unparalleled.
However, with the initiative to demonstrate, manage, operate and maintain an electrochemical energy storage system at the large scale of 100MWh, the organization was in dire need of an effective solution to manage such high volume. The solution? An IoT cloud-side collaboration with edge computing technologies working together in seamless tandem. It would theoretically balance energy storage unit situational awareness with self-regulated decentralized control and turnkey reliability assessment of all regular, and large-scale battery, energy storage systems. Not an easy task with any basic IoT-only solution, though: the organization definitely needed something more creative, innovative, and adaptive!
Challenge
Lack of reliability and too high of a cost
Limited management resources for high data volume and collection frequency
No real-time data analysis available
Achievements
15+% increase in battery life capacity
Reduced cost in battery replacement
Improvements in energy storage security
Savings of more than 30% in operations and maintenance cost
Solution
Bringing the Cloud and Edge Together for the Perfect Energy Storm
It was clear CTGCG needed to support not just a few thousand data points – but a million total. That would’ve been a lot for any organization, even for a mega-giant like CTGCG. The organization also needed the control response time to be well under 500 milliseconds, meeting the absolute demand of cooperative control, safety and reliable operation of those large-scale battery energy storage systems.
Here’s How the CTGCG Brought It All Together with EMQ
With EMQ’s cloud-side collaborative data access and processing capability, the vision was just within the horizon for what was possible. The key to success was in having an IoT infrastructure that could self-regulate, automated to accommodate what would normally be a centralized system. CTGCG quickly realized it needed to decentralize immediately, incorporating situational awareness, autonomy, reliability with online assessments, intelligent diagnosis, and early warning algorithms to catch any variables before they’d become true disasters. EMQ was indeed the answer.
Thanks to implementation of the new-generation energy storage device management platform, short-board effect of conventional BMS energy storage solutions would be a thing of the past. Enter: a significant increase in capacity, plus substantial economic benefits to boot.
Additionally, longer battery life and reduced battery replacement cost were immediate game changers, cascading into opportunities for reducing future operational and maintenance expense and even encouraging possibilities for follow-up investments in a burgeoning energy industry ripe for innovation. The benefits didn’t seem to end as even energy storage security protocols skyrocketed to stonewall any chance of systems failing – and if they would ever fail in any scenario, the infrastructure would still be always poised and ready to manage the unmanned real-time response and control via remote online mode, virtually lifting reliance on archaic manual operations at the upper station. It was unprecedented to think it was possible that such high volumes of data could be coordinated so well – autonomously and remotely!
A Look Into the Power of Neuron
The key to success was in implementing EMQ’s Nueron, parsing data transmission into MQTT protocols. One single Nueron node supports more than 3,000 data points. That’s more than significant. That’s cutting-edge. That even accommodated the chance of those data points exceeding the capacity by providing the option to deploy multiple instances within the gateway.
Think of the gateway as a set of toll booths on a highway, but with only enough open to efficiently and sufficiently manage the flow of traffic when it’s slow. Now imagine that gateway with an unlimited ability to open up more toll booths when things get congested. That gives you an idea on how powerful Neuron was, is, and will be for years to come.
NanoMQ and eKuiper: Supercharging the Flow of Traffic
IoT messaging is like that traffic the toll booths have to deal with. For CTCGC, that messaging had to be substantial, high volume – in a nutshell, intense – to accommodate the energy needs of countless networks in China. The way it would work is the edge broker, NanoMQ, would deliver all that raw data via parsed MQTT packets from eKuiper’s edge computing units to the central broker stored in the database. Edge computing devices, however, have limited computing power – therefore the edge broker needed to keep resources as low as possible while maintaining the highest performance and throughput.
With NanoMQ, only 200MB of memory was needed to support more than 800K messages per second! Not only that – NanoMQ managed to accomplish it for more than 6W of device connections per 1G of memory. Imagine the highway being so wide to accommodate all those messages (cars) going to their correct destinations – without taking up too much space. That’s NanoMQ and eKuiper working together well.
Lastly, EMQX and Edge Management: Reliability and Availability at Its Best
To round out all functionality, CTCGC needed a high-availability cluster at its core, able to carry more than 400K measurement points of original data. That included all the analytics and calculations the edge would generate. Thanks to EMQX, 500K to 1MM routes would be supported on just one single server node.
Additionally the rule engine would offer simple data cleaning, coding, decoding and format conversion for reliable configuration. The right responses to the right destinations: they would all persist and then be managed at the edge with a system capable of coordinating literally thousands of edge devices, but with the added benefit of gaining access into the cloud for faster computing power, transparency, security, and verification.
No one could beat that level of completion and comprehensiveness in an IoT partner.
What’s Next for CTCGC?
Simply put, we have an opportunity to learn more about the scope behind what CTCGC has done and can do with the toolset available via EMQ. Better yet: you have the opportunity to see a demo yourself. Imagine what’s possible! Reach out to us today.