Efforts of State Grid ensure stable energy supplies

After the rain, temperatures rise in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, to welcome the arrival of summer. As the temperatures increase, the demand for electricity and the electrical load are predictably expected to go up, too.

For the peak summer period, State Grid, adhering to the principle of "better to have a backup” and "not affect residents' lives or output of enterprises”, is making efforts to ensure the safe and stable operation of the power grid. By summarizing previous years' experiences in power load management, the company implemented precise strategies from promoting policy formulation and detailed load surveys to accelerating photovoltaic energy storage services to establish a solid foundation for the safe and stable operation of the power grid.

"When we talk about spending 'peak summer period', we are referring to how to give the annual electricity demand peak a stable guarantee," said Sun Ling, the load manager at the customer service center of the State Grid Shaoxing Power Supply Company. "During this critical period, we are busy tapping into resources, and conducting emergency drills to ensure preparedness." Sun has been closely monitoring the load curve of the enterprises under his responsibility, analyzing their load characteristics and negotiating load management measures for this summer with users based on the analysis results. The work involves signing notification letters, guiding enterprises to adjust production plans during peak periods and ensuring electricity for them.

In recent years, the number of hot summer days in Shaoxing has been increasing year-by-year, with the highest load of the whole city increasing by an average of 9.7 percent annually. In 2024, the load of air conditioners in Shaoxing in summer reached nearly 3.9 million kilowatts, equivalent to more than 3 million units of 1.5-horsepower air conditioners running simultaneously, exceeding one-third of the total electricity load of the entire city.

During the hot summer, the dependence of enterprise production activities on electricity also significantly increases. The stability of electricity supply directly affects the operation of their production lines, the quality assurance of products, and the timeliness of order delivery.

"In the summer, our company has a higher demand for orders, leading to an overall increase in load. Adequate power supply during summer, the reliability of power supply and emergency response capabilities are crucial for us. Only reliable power supply can ensure the orderly production of our company," said the head of Zhejiang Yingfeng Technology.

In the Shaoxing Chinese Textile City International Logistics Center, the newly launched photovoltaic panels at the end of April have covered almost all the rooftops of the park's warehouses, factory buildings, and office buildings, with a total installed capacity of 16 megawatts. With abundant sunlight, it can provide 80,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity to the park daily, fully meeting the park's daily electricity needs and effectively addressing the park's electricity usage during peak summer periods. The project is expected to exceed an annual power generation of 17 million kWh, resulting in an annual equivalent reduction of about 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Expanding load-side regulation resources has become an important focus of work during the peak summer period. The State Grid Shaoxing Power Supply Company has focused on visiting large-scale enterprises in industries such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals that have regular shutdown and maintenance plans to optimize production plans with them.

Changhai Branch of Zhejiang Medicine, located in the Binhai New Area of Shaoxing, is the core production base of Zhejiang Medicine. During a visit to the enterprise, Chen Jiang, the manager of the customer service center of the State Grid Shaoxing Power Supply Company, learned about the company's maintenance plan and then tried to guide the company to carry out staggered maintenance and adjust the transformer and overhead line maintenance plan to a certain time period in July and August. This is expected to release a load of about 20,000 kW daily during the maintenance period.

Currently, the company has guided 46 enterprises to adjust their maintenance plans to the peak summer period, aggregating a daily average maintenance capacity of 129,700 kW. The effort, to a certain extent, is reducing the overall load demand during the peak summer period.

In addition to concentrated maintenance and peak saving, the company relies on the independently developed power compass data platform to achieve real-time monitoring of the high-voltage user loads in the city on a daily basis. The company built a data model of the potential load-shifting users on a weekly basis and has diagnosed the load characteristics of more than 15,000 high-voltage industrial users in the city to create a list of 765 companies that stop work on weekends. In order to optimize the allocation of electricity resources during the week, the company is integrating a load-shifting capacity of 263,000 kW. For conventional industrial users, in-depth cooperation with foreign trade enterprises were performed to stabilize foreign trade and ensure their production.

This year, the local power department selected 242 large industrial enterprises and public institutions in the city to conduct regular energy efficiency diagnosis, effectively reducing the energy costs of enterprises.