Huawei’s Electric Power Digitalization business unit has announced its Intelligent Distribution Solution (IDS) at the 26th World Energy Congress in Rotterdam, Netherlands. IDS is an IoT platform designed to help electric power companies better manage challenges associated with the “last mile” connecting power grids to customers, including high line loss, unreliable service, and managing new energy loads.

Huawei claims that IDS can optimize power distribution, enhance grid reliability, and facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources. “Huawei’s Intelligent Distribution Solution enables power enterprises to shift from single-point digitalization of power distribution rooms to architecture-supported, evolvable, open, and systematic intelligence. With an open digital ecosystem, we can stimulate grassroots creativity internally and make industry and cross-industry capabilities available to customers externally,” said David Sun, vice president of Huawei and CEO of Huawei Electric Power Digitalization.

The IDS architecture uses a “cloud-pipe-edge-pipe-device” framework that includes an on-premise private cloud as the digital foundation, both wired and wireless solutions for the backhaul network, an all-in-one edge computing unit (ECU) for lean management, and next-generation high-speed power line carrier communication (HPLC) on the low-voltage side. This provides real-time measurable observations to help utility providers to optimize their operations, reduce costs, and identify and repair faults before power outages occur, according to Huawei.

One early implementer of IDS is China’s Shaanxi province in collaboration with the State Grid Shaanxi Electric Power Co., Ltd and partners. They are using IDS to manage over 100,000 distribution transformer districts, and they report reduced outage durations and higher power supply reliability rate. It has also enabled the seamless integration of over 50,000 residential photovoltaic sites and more than 1,000 large-scale 10kV photovoltaic sites, achieving 100% access and consumption.