In the book "The Third Industrial Revolution", economist Rifkin painted a picture of the new industrial revolution: the integration of Internet information technology and renewable energy will create a strong foundation for the third industrial revolution. Electric vehicles store and consume intermittent energy, share, and trade electricity through smart grids, and will become a major pillar of the third industrial revolution.
Such a picture is not a castle in the air. During the National Two Sessions this year, the general prediction of representatives of the new energy industry is that by 2030, the proportion of renewable energy power generation will exceed 20%. China's photovoltaic and wind power costs are fully equipped for large-scale promotion, but energy storage is the bottleneck, which must be solved by batteries, hydrogen energy, electric vehicles, etc.; the combination of electric vehicles and renewable energy to become a true new energy vehicle can also support Carbon reduction in the entire energy system. To realize such a strategy, power battery companies, as the dual attributes of vehicle power and energy storage, must play a role at the same time.
Exploration of New Business Forms in Power Battery Industry
More and more car companies and battery companies are beginning to realize that the transformation of automotive electrification must not be limited to the automotive industry itself, but also to consider coordination and integration with the energy system. To get through this step, the key lies in the power battery.
For electric vehicles to move further towards the C-end, it is necessary to consider the value of power batteries as energy storage and to fully "realize" them through business model innovation and technological empowerment. Only by fully releasing the smart terminal attributes and energy value attributes of electric vehicles, can the future industry be truly changed.
As early as 2016, Nissan began to test the water V2G (electric vehicle to the grid) technology in the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries. In 2018, Nissan released Nissan Energy, a V2G solution for building an EV ecosystem. Last year, it launched more technical trials and commercial explorations with Envision Technology Group and a number of power grid companies in Europe.
Connecting electric vehicles to the grid through V2G technology not only enables car owners to sell electric energy to the grid but more importantly, electric vehicles can be used as a distributed energy source to balance the grid load by participating in frequency regulation and peak regulation. In this way, the potential of the full life cycle of the battery can be used to solve the pain points of consumers for the high cost of electric vehicles and the low-value retention rate. At the same time, it can form a coordinated development for the grid.
Such exploration coincides with the appeal of Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on multiple occasions. Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has emphasized on multiple occasions that "power battery energy" is the general trend. New energy vehicles must advance in tandem with the energy revolution. Power batteries are not only the core of the electric vehicle revolution but also a new generation storage carrier of the energy revolution. They will be connected to each other through an intelligent power grid, and the importance of it is self-evident.
Changing the role of power battery energy
In recent years, battery companies represented by CATL and Vision AESC have begun to "awaken", realizing the multiple value attributes of power batteries, and no longer simply staying in the position of automotive power system suppliers, but have begun to gradually try to act as a new energy service provider. The role, participate in the automotive revolution in a deeper dimension.
At the beginning of the year, CATL and Baicheng New Energy, a new energy terminal operator, set up a joint venture, whose business involves the construction and operation of new energy technology, battery technology, and new energy vehicle charging and replacement facilities. The industry speculates that its purpose is to foresee the layout of the battery and charging service aftermarket.
Another power battery company, Envision AESC, has an earlier layout in this regard. Its parent company Envision Technology Group started from wind power generation and has accumulated profound experience and expertise in the design, investment, construction, and operation of wind power equipment manufacturing industry and renewable energy projects. Advantages and active exploration and practice have also been carried out in the fields of distributed energy, smart grid, energy storage technology, control technology, and power spot trading platform.
As early as when it acquired Nissan AESC last year, Vision clearly stated that electric vehicles should participate in fragmented renewable energy systems and provide intelligent dynamic balance to promote the common development of clean energy and new energy automotive industries.
To this end, Envision is opening up new businesses in Europe. Zhao Weijun, President of Envision AESC China, introduced that Envision has established a Center of Excellent in Paris to conduct technical research and commercial value exploration in areas such as smart grid, charging, and V2G..
The main consideration for launching the new business in Europe is that the European grid market is sufficiently market-oriented, especially in the auxiliary service market, so it has the value of electric vehicle battery energy storage in the grid auxiliary service. The scene of realization.
According to the EU’s comprehensive energy system research and development roadmap to 2030, it also clearly proposes to establish the technology and system flexibility to realize the intelligent charging of electric vehicles and V2G. This is the European construction of deep electrification, extensive digitalization, and complete carbon neutrality. An important part of the circular economy vision.
In the Netherlands and Spain, Envision cooperates with Nissan Leaf and local power grid companies to connect electric vehicles, energy storage, decommissioned power batteries, charging piles, and other hardware facilities to EnOS™ intelligent IoT operating system provided by Envision as a cloud collaboration platform. (Crowd Balancing Platform), through self-developed electricity price forecasting and operational optimization, the platform optimizes and controls energy-using facilities such as charging piles in real-time, participates in power grid bidding, and provides auxiliary services for the power grid. According to operating calculations, each Leaf user can obtain considerable benefits every year.
“Electric vehicle users may only use 20% of the battery’s SOC (battery load state), and close to 80% of its value is locked before its true end of life, and has not been released. This 80% of the value can be communicated with the grid and The energy storage link is fully utilized and generates actual benefits."
Zhao Weijun, President of Envision AESC China, said that if the car power battery participates in the inertia response of the grid and the paid auxiliary service such as one-time frequency modulation, the battery cost can be reduced by three thirds without the existing process and manufacturing. First, this one-third is not mainly due to its cost reduction, but benefits from the realization of the value of the whole life cycle, this cost can be paid by the power grid.
More important is the potential demand from the grid side. Once electric vehicles are launched on a large scale, the power grid will inevitably face a huge load of electricity. How to resolve this pressure requires the use of the energy storage value of electric vehicles.
According to the data given by AESC, by 2025, there will be about 100GWh of energy storage space on the power generation side, while batteries from pure electric vehicles will require at least 600GWh. The number of power batteries is much greater than the number of batteries on the power generation side. Dynamic balance is likely to be coordinated by electric vehicles.
Based on the current domestic new energy vehicle inventory, assuming that the average battery capacity of each vehicle is 50 kWh, a full charge of 3.1 million pure electric vehicles requires 155 million kWh, and each vehicle transmits 70% of the electricity to the grid. By calculation, it can contribute 108.5 billion kilowatt-hours per day, and approximately 39.6 billion kilowatt-hours per year, which is equivalent to the total amount of electricity used in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou for one month.
Therefore, when Envision AESC entered the field of power batteries, it did not simply position itself as a battery system supplier but also proposed to play the role of battery energy service in the future to realize the dynamic integration of electric vehicles and renewable energy systems.
Envision AESC's energy service sample
Realizing the role-playing of energy services does not happen overnight. It requires battery companies’ product development (intelligent battery design and manufacturing), software capabilities (underlying operating system construction), system construction (integration with energy systems), and other aspects. ready.
At present, when joining the energy service queue, Envision AESC has obvious advantages in at least three aspects. One is its own energy company genes, the other is its experience accumulation and intelligent innovation in the battery field, and the third is its intelligent IoT operating system EnOS™.
Before the acquisition of Nissan AESC, Envision had accumulated many years in the fields of wind power and energy storage. Compared with other power battery companies, it has the genes of an energy company.
In the intelligent design and manufacturing of batteries, Envision AESC combines past experience and insights in the battery field to establish a digital development process and test verification system. In every key link of battery design, a small closed loop is formed by designing and testing prototypes to produce simulation models. In turn, risks are identified early, design efficiency is improved, and development time is shortened.
In terms of manufacturing, Envision AESC has relatively high requirements for MES (Manufacturing Execution Management System) in terms of process control, process control, information flow, and comprehensive data collection in each process. The battery equipment and process are monitored in real-time to achieve rapid two-way feedback of battery cell quality and process data and timely warning and adjustment of abnormal parameters fed back by the equipment.
In addition to reserves in the field of smart batteries, more importantly, Envision has a smart IoT operating system EnOS™.
Taking its V2G landing in Europe as an example, EnOS™'s main capabilities are reflected in four aspects, one is the operation and control strategy of the power grid and battery charging and discharging itself, and the other is the algorithm and optimization of machine learning, including the prediction of dynamic electricity prices, Battery SOH (battery state of health), SOC prediction, and users' driving habits and charging habits, etc. The third is the device access of the Internet of Things platform, and the fourth is the deployment and algorithm optimization after the device is connected.
Zhao Weijun said that based on the integration of the battery and the EnOS™ operating system, Envision is constantly abstracting and refining the digital attributes generated by the battery in the process of R&D, manufacturing, and use, and establishing a comprehensive digital perception of the battery. Only by grasping the digital perception of battery life cycle performance status can the battery be truly integrated into the future energy system, and electric vehicles can be combined with photovoltaic, wind power, and other new energy generation so that the energy Internet can be implemented and the energy power can be truly electrified. Energy production is low-carbon and energy systems are intelligent.
It is foreseeable that in the near future, more and more battery companies will leap from a single power battery supplier to an energy service provider, like the AESC and Ningde era. The vision of the new industrial revolution described by Rifkin will also land in China in the near future.
