On February 26, China Southern Power Grid Energy Storage issued an announcement announcing that it would cooperate with NIO to carry out comprehensive cooperation in the fields of virtual power plant, battery swap station business, battery cascade and ** utilization.
This means that after many years of layout in the field of battery swapping, NIO's commercial imagination with battery swapping as the core has begun to land.
What is a "virtual power plant"?
At present, the increase in electricity demand, large-scale access to new energy sources, and the increase in power electronic facilities in most parts of China have brought challenges to the balance, regulation and support capacity of the power system. Virtual power plants are of great significance for promoting the balance between supply and demand of the power grid, realizing the low-cost integration of distributed energy resources into the grid, fully absorbing clean energy, and ensuring the safe operation of the power system.
The "virtual power plant" is not a power plant in the traditional sense, but an energy management system, which can aggregate and coordinate the distributed energy resources such as clean energy, energy storage systems, and controllable loads on the user side through advanced metering, information communication, control and management technologies, and participate in the operation of the power grid.
Specifically, when the energy demand is large, the virtual power plant can release electric energy through energy storage carriers such as electric vehicles to meet the electricity demand. When there is a surplus of energy, the virtual power plant can feed the excess power back to the grid to realize the reuse of electric energy. Through this form of vehicle-network interaction, electric vehicles can participate in application scenarios such as peak shaving, virtual power plants, and aggregation transactions, effectively balancing the contradiction between the development of new energy vehicles and the load of the power grid. In January this year, the National Development and Reform Commission, the National Energy Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued the "Implementation Opinions on Strengthening the Integration and Interaction of New Energy Vehicles and Power Grids", proposing to actively carry out the pilot demonstration of vehicle-network interaction.
A month later, the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration jointly issued the "Notice on Establishing and Improving the Market Mechanism of Electric Power Auxiliary Services", deciding to establish and improve the market mechanism of electric power auxiliary services from the national level, scientifically determine the market demand for auxiliary services, reasonably set up paid auxiliary service varieties, and standardize market rules such as auxiliary service pricing. In accordance with the overall principle of "who serves, who profits, who benefits, and who bears", we will continuously improve the formation mechanism of auxiliary services, promote the standardized and orderly transmission and sharing of auxiliary service costs, and fully mobilize the enthusiasm of flexible adjustment resources to participate in system adjustment.
In other words, through power regulation, the virtual power plant not only realizes the effective dispatch of electric energy, but also obtains benefits in the market through electric energy trading. With the gradual integration of a large number of distributed energy resources into the power system, virtual power plants have ushered in a broad space for development. According to Huaan**, by 2025, China's virtual power plant market space will reach 78.4 billion yuan, and by 2030, it will reach 172.9 billion yuan.
In this context, energy and power companies in various places, including China Southern Power Grid, have begun to take action, and Shenzhen, Hainan and Guangzhou have set up virtual power plant management centers to provide a platform for virtual power plants, load aggregators, and adjustable loads to participate in auxiliary services.
NIO's "social practice" and "car network business".
Although the market space is huge, at present, the construction of virtual power plants in China is still in its infancy, and the interaction between the power grid and enterprises has just begun.
Through years of layout in the field of battery swapping, perfect products and V2G technology foundation, coupled with mature operation experience. As early as 2019, NIO organized battery swap stations and home charging piles in Shanghai through the "Energy Cloud" to participate in the peak shaving and valley filling of the city's power grid. In addition, NIO has also linked up with local power grid companies and energy power generation companies through a number of pilot projects to realize the application of virtual power plants in the power ancillary service market.
Previously, NIO, together with the Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau of China Southern Power Grid and the China Southern Power Grid Research Institute, used 5G dedicated slicing technology to regulate and control battery swap stations in seconds on the Shenzhen virtual power plant platform, and verified the frequency modulation technology of virtual power plants for the first time in China Southern Power Grid, which basically has the function of a physical power plant, which will help improve the city's power guarantee capacity and new energy consumption capacity, and export the "Shenzhen experience" for the construction and operation of domestic virtual power plants.
In addition, NIO United Nations Grid Hefei Power Supply Bureau has carried out a research and demonstration of "5G + quantum + battery swap station" fast frequency modulation technology, and the addition of 5G new technology has greatly shortened the speed of Hefei virtual power plant to regulate and control battery swap stations from about 90 seconds in the past to 15 seconds or even shorter, while the "quantum encryption" technology has added randomly changing passwords to load modulation instructions, greatly improving operational safety and reliability.
In this cooperation, NIO will be responsible for the daily operation of the battery swap station, estimate the adjustable range of charging load through the order of the battery swap station** and the actual **, declare the adjustment capability to the CSG energy storage virtual power plant in real time through 5G, and respond to the regulation instructions of the CSG energy storage virtual power plant in seconds, providing adjustment capabilities close to electrochemical energy storage, thereby reducing energy storage investment and providing more flexible adjustment resources for the power system.
The day before the cooperation was signed, Shen Fei, vice president of NIO, posted on Weibo that NIO's battery swap station participates in grid regulation, mainly energy-based peak regulation services and power-based frequency modulation services. Among them, the peak shaving service can be called "off-peak charging", that is, to increase the electricity price during the peak load period of the power grid, guide users to charge less or even discharge, and reduce the electricity price during the trough period of the grid load, and the user can choose to charge at this time. By doing so, it is expected to save about 12 to 1500 million yuan.
Shen Fei also revealed that NIO's battery swap station in Denmark has successfully started to provide frequency modulation services to the power grid, which is a small step for NIO Energy in Europe and a big step for the entire battery swap business model, marking the participation of the battery swap station in the grid frequency modulation service as an energy storage device. Shen Fei said that it is expected that China's battery swap stations can also enter the field of vehicle-network integration and interaction of peak regulation and frequency regulation on a large scale in the form of aggregated virtual power plants.
In a series of practices, NIO's battery swap technology has played a great role, and more and more people have seen the great value of NIO's battery swap model.
Since November last year, some car companies such as Changan, Geely, JAC, and Chery have chosen to cooperate with NIO to jointly deploy battery swap construction, benefiting users on both sides.
On January 11 this year, Anhui Energy Group, Anhui Traffic Control Group and NIO signed the "Strategic Cooperation Agreement on Jointly Promoting the Construction of an Open and Shared Storage, Charging and Swapping System" in Hefei, and Zhongan Energy was established on the same day. The signatories will jointly support Zhongan Energy to build 1,000 storage, charging and swapping integrated battery swap stations.
For car companies and capital, it is not only a practice that is highly in line with national policies to jointly promote the construction of charging and swapping networks and standard systems, and to carry out the promotion and application of battery swapping modes.
NIO's commercial value has been further demonstrated
From the perspective of professionals, NIO is fundamentally different from other electric vehicle companies, and the most prominent point is that NIO has established the breadth and depth of technology in the layout of the energy system, forming the business map of NIO Energy.
In terms of the breadth of layout, public information shows that NIO is already the car brand with the largest number of charging piles and battery swap stations in China's market. At present, NIO has built 2,375 battery swap stations and 21,603 public charging piles across the country, and by the end of February 2024, NIO has organized 587 battery swap stations and more than 2 charging piles70,000 units participate in demand response and peak shaving auxiliary services in 14 provinces and cities across the country, with a total peak shaving capacity of about 300,000 kilowatts.
According to the plan, NIO will build another 1,000 battery swap stations and 20,000 new charging poles this year to further improve the user power supply experience. By 2025, NIO will open up a highway battery swap network in 19 major urban agglomerations with 9 verticals, 9 horizontals. With the implementation of the new round of the "Thousand Stations Plan", NIO users will have a more convenient energy replenishment experience in urban areas and highways than refueling.
The reason why NIO has made such a large-scale investment in energy replenishment is to bring users a more convenient refueling experience than refueling. At present, NIO's battery swap station can achieve "full power in three minutes", which effectively complements the charging service facilities.
With the gradual opening of the virtual power plant business, NIO's layout in the vehicle-network interaction and energy fields is accelerating, and its value is also being realized and amplified. First of all, as the first smart microgrid-type distributed battery swap facility in China, NIO's battery swap station can obtain benefits by connecting to virtual grid services. Secondly, the V2G charging stations that have been put into operation can not only obtain power from the grid for charging, but also feed back the electric energy in the on-board battery to the power grid, which can realize green energy consumption, reduce the impact on the external environment, and also provide certain economic returns for new energy vehicle owners.
The series of cooperation with China Southern Power Grid Energy Storage will undoubtedly further accelerate the construction and layout of NIO's battery swap stations. In the future, the two sides will continue to explore the establishment of standards for vehicle-network interaction, so that more new energy vehicles can be connected to the power grid to obtain benefits, and jointly work on the construction of a new power system.