“Made in China 2025” is a policy initiative first released in May of 2015, aiming to comprehensively upgrade the nation's industry in the upcoming decade as China seeks to assume a leading position in global production chains. Soon after the initial release, a “1+X” expansion was announced, with “1” signifying the original document and “X” representing an additional 11 implementation and development guide documents. On August 20, 2016, the first complete batch of these supplementary documents was released, including implementation guides for the “Big Five Engineering Sectors.”
The “Big Five” includes implementation plans for a manufacturing innovation center, strengthening industry, green manufacturing, smart manufacturing, and high-end equipment innovation engineering. The addition six documents cover themes ranging from human talent in the manufacturing industry, the information industry, the new materials industry, four development plans for the medical industry, developing service model manufacturing, to promoting manufacturing of quality products and equipment.
As these documents provide a clear indicator of the government’s development priorities, CNESA is pleased to report that several technologies in the electricity sector were highlighted in the “Big Five,” including energy storage. Some key elements of the document are listed below:
Smart grids and renewable resources grid integration
- Calls for the increase the use of renewable energy, and promotes large-scale renewables sources entering the grid. In particular, calls for research and project demonstrations using wind and solar inverter/converters, allowing wind/solar energy to feed back into the grid.
- Calls for electricity generation from renewable sources and accompanying big data modeling and research analysis.
- Calls for the application of cloud computing and the Internet of Things to enable operations and monitoring as well as accompanying research and data analysis of such monitoring systems technologies.
- Calls for technology breakthroughs in the use of intermittent high voltage DC transmission and DC transmission in offshore wind farms.
High capacity electricity transmission technology & equipment
- Calls for overall mastery of manufacturing 1100 kV scale ultra-high vacuum AC transmission equipment.
- Calls for independent research into earthquake resistant models using AC transformer bushing.
- Calls for developments in optical fiber sensors for passive optical current transformers.
- Calls for technology breakthroughs in converter transformer and converter transformer bushing, terminal device, smoothing reactor and DC transmission thyristor valves and other key equipment and parts, demonstration and application of combination of high capacity power transmission project to promote the construction of independent technical equipment.
Smart grid advanced technology equipment
- With smart grid project construction, calls for the opening of 500 kV/3000 MW flexible DC systems and supporting safety control equipment.
- Calls for core equipment for the Energy Internet, including advanced energy storage technology and smart transformers, among these goals seeking mastery of manufacturing smart transformers, 3D printing technology, user-end energy management systems as well as research and development into connector equipment technology.
- To extend the use of smart transformer equipment, calls for inspection and repair of existing transmission and transformer equipment, smart routing inspection of transformer stations, and automation of power distribution.
Electric energy storage and new high power electronics equipment and materials
- Calls for research and development into 10 MW grade compressed air storage, flywheel storage, high-temperature superconductor storage, high capacity supercapacitor storage, 10 MW scale flow battery storage, all vanadium flow battery storage, high performance lead-carbon battery storage, 25 kV aluminum sodium flow battery units, 100 MV grade titanium acid lithium ion battery storage.
- Calls for breakthroughs in materials such as SiC and GaN in wide-bandgap semiconductor devices, high voltage/high current switching devices and equipment, high voltage and large capacity solid-state power electronic converters, research and development in high voltage devices and packaging, and drive circuit design technology.
With the release of the implementation plans for the “Big Five,” we can see a priority on research and innovation as China updates its grid, indicating government support of the emerging energy storage industry.
For more information in the original Chinese, click here.