Digital CSG Reshapes the Energy Industry

Guangzhou - A recent forum was held to highlight China Southern Power Grid’s digital support development of the Greater Bay Area, a newly proposed region that integrates Hong Kong, Macau and nine other cities throughout South China.

At the forum, CSG senior managers announced a project estimated at 10 billion RMB ($150 million USD) to digitalize the Company.

The project, driven by the concept of digitalization, applies the technology pertaining to the Internet, big data, AI, and blockchain to reform the ways the Company produces, operates and manages its business.

The project is expected to foster the Company’s growth in both the upstream and downstream of the energy industry valued at one hundred billion RMB ($1.5 billion USD).

Personal, leisure and business customers in the Greater Bay Area are all expected to benefit from a streamlined presentation of electrical power supplies and consumption.

China Southern Power Grid senior managers on hand during the forum, appealed to stakeholders in the energy business to, “work together and build a new energy industry”.

As a corporate practice, CSG is in pursuit of support and suggestions from other enterprises in the energy sector for constructing this new “Digital CSG”, so as to boost the company’s transformation to a smart grid operator, a value chain coordinator in the energy sector, and an energy ecosystem service provider to, in total, support the development of the Greater Bay Area.

Digitalization Revitalizes the Power Grid

CSG operates the world's most complex hybrid AC/DC power grid which generates massive amounts of data every second.

From a macro perspective, compounded data reflects overall conditions of the overall Chinese economy as well as trends in energy development.

From a micro point of view, the data reflects specific energy demands of individual users and enterprises. To digitalize CSG is to improve power efficiency and to reduce energy consumption by collecting, mining, and analyzing data from the power grid.

According to Lou Shan, director of the digitalization department of CSG, “you can regard the operation of the power grid as the movement of a puppet. In the old days, we had to manually guide every move of the puppet, but now, we are building a digital network in its body, giving it a sensitive nervous system and an intelligent brain. In this way, the power grid can allocate resources with high efficiency and connect with a wider range of socio-economic sectors.”

In Year 2019, CSG unveiled Action Plan of Digital Transformation and Construction of Digital CSG (2019). Under the plan, CSG senior managers are carrying out the "Four-Three-Two-One" Project, which will build four major business platforms, three basic operation platforms, two connections and one database center in CSG.

The four major business platforms are for power grid construction management, customer service, power supply arrangement, and overall operation management of the company. The three basic platforms include the CSG Cloud Platform, digital power grid and IoT.

The two connections refer to joining the network of industry and digital government of China as well as the network within the expanding Greater Bay Area. The single one database center, last but not the least, is where all the data of the company is stored.

With the completion of the project, operation conditions about the power grid will continue to be reviewed; the Company will be managed fully online; all business data will be under management which will provide better services for CSG customers and better energy cooperation will be achieved.

Digital CSG will be capable of providing basic services during Year in 2019 before interconnecting the upstream and downstream of the energy industry chain by 2020.

The overall completion date for Digital CSG is Year 2025.