China Opens Large-Scale Construction of Smart Grid

The first “smart substation” 220 kV (Xiyu) smart substation in mainland China was built in Wuxi, Jiangsu. At this point, China has opened a large-scale prelude to the construction of smart grids, and the total investment is expected to exceed 4 trillion yuan in 10 years.

China is the world’s second largest energy consumer and has the world’s largest grid system. By 2020, mainland China will have to meet the electricity demand of 485 million users and the installed capacity is expected to reach 1.6 billion kilowatts, which is twice the current level. In response to the situation, in July 2009, China decided to build a "strong smart grid" in three phases: a pilot project from 2009 to 2010, a large-scale construction project from 2011 to 2015, and a basic construction by 2020.

Sun Zhusen, an investigator of the State Grid Corporation of China, said that smart grid construction is a systematic project that covers the intelligentization of power lines and dispatch, the “four-in-one” residential community, and electric vehicles on the roads. It is also part of the smart substation. . The substation that was put into operation today is the first 220 kilovolt substation in the 46 smart substations of the State Grid Corporation of China.

The reporter saw on the scene that a large number of small white antennas were deployed in the station to sense flooding, smoke, temperature and humidity, and these monitoring data were reflected on several display screens in the control room. The substation is located in Qianzhou Township, Huishan District, Wuxi City, and 160 kilometers away from Beijing West Road, Nanjing City where Jiangsu Electric Power Company is located. However, the data can be presented in real time in the Nanjing office.

The reporter learned that since the beginning of this year, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, Zhejiang and other places have launched smart grid development plans, and pilot projects have been rolled out across the continent. Take Jiangsu as an example. In addition to smart substations, Jiangsu’s 5 million users have installed “black boxes” on the electricity meters, which allows them to have remote automatic collection functions. Wuxi builds “intelligent communities,” and households can use the terminals at any time to learn about household electricity consumption. Yangzhou, Suzhou and Jiangyin built 4 electric vehicle charging stations, and their operation monitoring system was completed.