Located on the Yangtze River, the Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydroelectric project in the world. It sits on China’s “Golden Waterway” to control floods, boost water transport and generate prodigious amounts of electricity.
The dam is one of six giant hydroelectric power stations along this river. Together with Gezhouba, Xiangjiaba, Xiluodu, Baihetan and Wudongde, it is built and operated by China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG). This public clean energy company deploys 110 hydroelectric generators with a total capacity of 71.695 million kW and an annual output of 300 billion kWh, saving 90.45 million tons of coal annually.
You may think that hydroelectricity is a primitive, poorly managed or poorly secured technology. But CTG has transformed its hydroelectric plants with the latest technology. Digital advancements such as cloud computing and big data provided by Huawei Cloud protect barrage operations in real time. Hydropower has never been so smart.
Why CTG is diving into the cloud to transform
To become a world-class clean energy group and leader of the innovation curve, CTG wanted to leverage digital transformation for efficiency, management and innovation.
They have deployed several infrastructure platforms at different stages of development. However, these dispersed platforms made it difficult to balance resource usage, upgrade architectures, and centralize monitoring and management. CTG wanted a single central cloud platform that connected its legacy platforms and flexibly scaled to meet its ever-increasing business needs.
Another challenge was the sheer volume of data generated every day. Since data is a key enabler of digital transformation, CTG needed help unlocking its value for more secure hydropower generation. CTG researched big data technologies to collect and merge generator data in real time. They hoped to establish models for pre-warnings, fault diagnosis and performance optimization. With these models, they avoided unplanned shutdowns and major breakdowns while improving hydraulic power utilization and equipment availability.
Fortunately, CTG chose Huawei Cloud as a competent and trusted partner. Drawing on Huawei’s years of technical expertise and experience serving the digital transformation of various enterprises, Huawei Cloud rose to the challenge. Since 2019, the partnership continues to dive into the cloud from a solid foundation for digital transformation.
A cloud unifies the whole group
CTG has taken advantage of MRS provided by Huawei Cloud Stack to create many management systems: personnel, finance, material, planning, contracts, procurement and technologies.
Since 2021, CTG has been using Huawei Cloud Stack to deploy the Three Gorges cloud platform it needed for unified planning, easy sharing, and centralized deployment. This single, unified cloud for the entire group centralizes resource provisioning and provides a scalable infrastructure for a wide range of applications. Agile innovation takes power generation security to the next level. The platform is located in CTG’s main data center located in Yichang, a prefectural city in China. 300 deployed nodes provide the approximately 10,000 compute resources CTG needs for infrastructure and digital transformation.
Cloud-based data governance and analytics for smart power generation
CTG has leveraged big data capabilities provided by Huawei Cloud Stack to unify data standards, which boosts data sharing. Exploring the value of data to improve data convergence and system integration, they built a command center with dashboards for actionable data insights. All of this has helped CTG improve the efficiency of operations and emergency response management.
Data governance is crucial in power generation. CTG’s six power stations are scattered in different provinces, generating OT data from more than 4 million measurement points and 50,000 data tables from computing devices. IT and OT data is scattered across different platforms, resulting in silos and delays.
Huawei Cloud’s data governance center, DataArts Studio, helped CTG turn things around. It centrally accesses statistics collected from underwater robots, generator sets, and power plant motor rotors on the edge. A useful user interface provides visual configurations for data processing. Moreover, it merges and imports offline computing data and real-time computing and OT data into data lakes. Using DataArts Studio, CTG establishes data lineage and quickly identifies faulty devices.
The architecture leveraging cloud-edge synergy consists of a central cloud and six edge clouds each for a power plant. Edge data merged in the center.
CTG leveraged Huawei Cloud’s FusionInsight MRS to deploy a lakehouse architecture that unifies data lakes and warehouses into a single real-time data lake. The data lake accessed 100 GB of data included in over 5,000 tables from over 60 data sources and transformed the data into over 3,000 data assets in 50 categories. MRS has also helped CTG create big data models and analysis applications for power generation. 11 major station applications, including operations, device maintenance and production, have achieved real-time data analysis. Faults are detected in advance and corrected quickly.
Song Jinghui, a senior researcher from the technology research center of China Yangtze Power (a subsidiary of CTG), said, “MRS helped us identify the drop in fuel levels within a thrust bearing 10 days in advance. For a given set of power units and with the same water height, less water consumption means greater efficiency. Considering the annual energy yield, even a 1% reduction in water consumption means much higher efficiency.
The smart database enables CTG to unlock the value of big cloud data – the constant push they need to drive smart power generation.
Use clean energy and protect the ecology of the Yangtze River
Digital technologies are driving CTG to go beyond power generation: smart dam operations, developing new energy, and protecting the ecology of the Yangtze River.
CTG powers water pollution control in cities. A comprehensive supervision system centrally controls water pollution from factories, stations, pipeline networks, rivers to outlets. A visual monitoring and governance platform sends prompt warnings, identifies sources and penalizes violators. While centrally monitoring and controlling water environments, CTG also piloted a smart water project. Technologies such as ultrasonic radars, microchips, mobile internet and geographic information system (GIS) help protect endangered fish in the Yangtze River. CTG visually monitors Chinese sturgeon released into the Yangtze River online and performs analysis based on the data. This creates an internet to access sturgeon data.
CTG has also invested in the development of IDC. They are working with Huawei on a zero carbon data center for green power in green computing. The first phase is currently in production and has become the largest data center in central China.
Jin Heping, Chief Information Engineer of China Yangtze Power, said, “One of the important strategies for digital transformation in the 14e The national five-year plan aims to promote digital industrialization, not just digitization of industry. With bits (information) generating watts (power), we are driving digital industrialization by accelerating green computing using clean energy and developing services to keep data flowing.
By moving to the cloud and making full use of data and smart technologies, CTG is spearheading digital transformation while promoting both industry digitization and digital industrialization. CTG is committed to using clean energy and protecting the ecology of the Yangtze River.
With 30 years of history and now empowered by digital technology, CTG will see a brighter and more sustainable future.
Learn how Huawei Cloud can help China Three Gorges Group improve efficiency, security and innovation for a sustainable future here.
