How can commercial and industrial energy storage participate in virtual power plants as a response subject? Sermatec Energy’s practical sharing

At present, facing the challenges of frequent extreme weather and "peak" power load, virtual power plants have attracted attention as flexible and dispatchable resources. Sermatec Energy, as an energy digitalization operator with energy storage as its core, actively explores the virtual power plant aggregation platform, develops its own smart energy management system, and creates an integrated solution to provide solid support for relieving power supply pressure and increasing user benefits.

As the temperature rises in midsummer, electricity consumption continues to rise, and power loads in many places have reached new highs. It is predicted that the national maximum power load will increase by about 100 million kilowatts during the peak summer period this year, and supply may be tight in some areas. In the face of challenges, the National Development and Reform Commission emphasizes improving power generation capacity and calling on controllable resources. As a controllable resource, virtual power plants have ushered in a small climax in construction.

In recent years, in order to accelerate the construction of flexible resources and promote the market-oriented operation of virtual power plants, governments in many places have actively responded and issued policy documents to promote the implementation of virtual power plant pilot projects. Virtual power plants have gone from "virtual" to "real", bringing opportunities for the mass production of key equipment and the construction of resource aggregation platforms. User-side energy storage projects participate in the power market through the virtual power plant platform, alleviate power supply pressure, and bring benefits to users.

As a professional energy digitalization operator with energy storage as its core, Sermatec Energy is also actively exploring the field of virtual power plant aggregation platform. Based on the system design architecture of "cloud, edge, end" and 6S, it has independently developed a smart energy management system suitable for the development needs of virtual power plants. It has also created an integrated solution including microgrid systems, industrial and commercial microgrid twin platforms, and virtual power plant aggregation platforms, providing solid support for promoting the entry of virtual power plants into the market and resolving the contradiction between electricity supply and demand.

In the past, traditional summer peak demand response was mainly regulated by orderly power consumption and load reduction. However, this regulation method of simply reducing load has a great impact on factory users themselves, and may even cause some users to lose profits. In contrast, Sermatec Energy's virtual power plant uses its abundant energy storage resources to respond to demand invitations, ensuring a rapid response to grid commands without affecting the factory's own load, and improving the utilization rate of smaller-scale industrial and commercial distributed energy storage, promoting multi-party collaboration, and improving the overall benefits of the virtual power plant platform.

In addition, Sermatec Energy's virtual power plant aggregation platform supports access to virtual power plant management platforms in multiple regions, such as Shenzhen Virtual Power Plant Management Platform, Jiangsu DSM Management Platform, etc. Sermatec Virtual Power Plant Aggregation Platform supports access to multiple power stations and fully connects to the upstream dispatching platform online, providing great convenience for our customers and operators.

To achieve true "power plant-level" dispatching, a key threshold for virtual power plants is response speed. The primary and secondary frequency regulation in the power sector requires the participants to respond quickly within seconds, but it is difficult for narrow-sense virtual power plants to meet this "power plant-level" dispatching capability. The energy storage equipment of the Sermatec Energy Virtual Power Plant Aggregation Platform can achieve millisecond-level response to dispatching instructions. This precise regulation capability is exactly the high-quality regulation resource that the power grid urgently needs.

In the future, as more and more resources are connected, the platform will also face various characteristics and needs of customers. To this end, Sermatec Energy has designed a variety of response strategies for users to choose from, such as on-demand calling, sequential calling, or multiple stations divided equally in a certain proportion. In the face of an increasingly rich variety of power transactions, the platform can also adopt dynamic strategies to dispatch resources to accurately participate in various invitations such as power auxiliary services, demand response, and power spot markets, and use algorithm models to calculate the strategy that meets the highest profit in the current scenario, while ensuring that the interests of the station itself are prioritized, and maximizing the benefits of users. According to the platform's calculations, compared with the previous fixed strategies, Sermatec Energy's automatic optimization strategy can increase the overall profit by 30%.

At a time when digital technology is creating a "new world" of virtual power plants, digital transformation is certainly important for current energy management. However, Sermatec Energy's other identity - energy storage supplier - has also contributed to the rapid growth of its virtual power plant business.

During the construction and operation of virtual power plants, how to ensure the security and stability of each end, how to continuously develop more complete energy access management solutions, and how to solve the diversified needs of different customers are all the current focus of the industry. In virtual power plants, the most flexible and controllable resource is distributed energy storage. Such projects are often small in scale, large in number, and have a single revenue model. They also face greater challenges in data transmission and resource management. Due to multiple factors such as technology and experience, the overall level of digital and intelligent application in the energy storage industry is high but not sophisticated.

As a veteran supplier of energy storage equipment, Sermatec Energy is well aware of the various pain points and difficulties in the industry, and with its "digital" technology advantages, it has broken through the various challenges that virtual power plants may face in the later operation stages one by one.

Sermatec Energy launched a microgrid management system based on industrial and commercial electricity scenarios, with energy storage as the core. It can efficiently integrate resources such as photovoltaics, energy storage, and charging piles, and superimpose user loads and power grids to create a virtual power plant closed-loop ecosystem, realizing scene-level comprehensive energy management and control. At the same time, the platform also supports two technical methods, "cloud-to-cloud interconnection" and "cloud-edge interconnection", to achieve multiple functions of green power production, consumption, optimization, and settlement through smarter and more efficient data interaction.

In particular, user-side energy storage and distributed photovoltaics place greater emphasis on equipment safety. Sermatec's platform can use artificial intelligence technology to monitor the operating conditions of equipment such as energy storage systems in real time, and automatically predict faults based on historical data and features. It also supports remote control by operation and maintenance personnel, which not only protects the safety of equipment and operation and maintenance personnel, but also ensures the stable operation of the platform. Through the tracing, monitoring and management of electricity use throughout its life cycle, as well as the dynamic adjustment of operation control strategy solutions, Sermatec Energy will effectively promote the integrated application of digital technology and energy technology, and accelerate the implementation of virtual power plants.