In order to build a solid power supply barrier, he "races" against disasters!

Many people have seen such a picture: electricians are suspended on wires hundreds of meters high to perform live work. At this time, a group of magpies fly over in the air. From below, the low-flying magpies seem to be larger than the figures working at high altitudes. For Jiangsu, a province with a large electricity consumption in my country, such scenes are even more common. The ±800 kV Jiansu line, an ultra-high voltage transmission line in its territory, is the "main artery" of my country's "West-to-East Power Transmission" project. The Jinsha River water rushing down from Baihetan drives the surging electricity, which flows into Jiangsu along the 2,080-kilometer-long ultra-high voltage Jiansu line, and also brings a steady stream of clean energy to the people of the country.

Although Hohai University is located quite a distance from here, both universities belong to Jiangsu and share the same responsibility of serving the world. Together they have crossed mountains and rivers, experienced scorching summers and cold winters on the road to development, and they also yearn for a smooth road. The former practices and the latter conducts research, and they have shouldered the heavy responsibility of solving the electricity problems of more than one billion people.

▲Wang Chong (fourth from left) takes a group photo with students from the research group

"Once any problems or failures occur in the power system, they must be solved in a hurry, otherwise it is likely to cause immeasurable economic losses and social impacts. However, in recent years, the frequency of extreme weather has continued to increase, and the resulting power outages in the power system have also increased, posing a serious threat to the safe and stable operation of the power system. This is a 'disaster' for the power system and a test for us." Wang Chong, a young professor at the School of Energy and Electrical Engineering of Hohai University, has been rooted in the front line of power research for many years and has accumulated a lot of experience and insights. The heavy burden of ensuring power operation and maintenance has also been passed down from the predecessors and gradually fell on the shoulders of the young generation of scholars who have grown up.

“Research directions brought by typhoons”

A netizen once asked on a foreign forum: Is it true that China has 24-hour power supply all year round? This has almost become a basic guarantee for daily life in the eyes of Chinese people, but it has become a question worth exploring in the eyes of others, which has caused heated discussions on the Internet. The root cause is that it is not an easy task to continuously ensure the power supply of more than one billion people, and it is full of sweat and hard work.

Before 2014, the United States was the world's largest exporter of electricity, and it had held this "throne" for more than a hundred years. In the past, the United States had great technological advantages and dominance in power generation, and many countries relied on it for power generation, but after crossing the "watershed" of time, the situation changed. In 2001, my country's electricity consumption was huge, but its technology was still catching up, while its economy ushered in a golden period of take-off. If all walks of life want to make greater breakthroughs or progress, they cannot be separated from sufficient power support. Therefore, in order to help economic development while protecting and serving the people's livelihood, practitioners in the power sector continue to overcome difficulties and sharpen their swords. In 2006, my country's UHV technology entered the trial stage; in 2014, UHV technology achieved innovative breakthroughs, which not only broke the hegemony of the United States in the power sector, but also became a new national business card for my country, and even created new international standards due to its outstanding performance. This not only reshaped the situation of the game between major powers at the energy level, but also brought a more firm and positive belief to Wang Chong, who had already entered the doctoral study stage at that time.

When Wang Chong finished the college entrance examination, the power industry had not yet become one of the most popular majors on the volunteer list, but with his love for physics and curiosity about the invisible but powerful substance "electricity", he resolutely chose the electrical engineering major at Hohai University. This persistent love urged him to fill the 7 years of undergraduate and master's studies at Hohai University with hard work and practice. During this period, he never forgot his original intention, "My career goal is to ensure that electricity is delivered to every user's home in a safe and economical way."

Therefore, Wang Chong cherished the opportunity to study at the University of Hong Kong, but the difficulty of choosing a research direction also made him scratch his head for a while. "Electrical science has many branches and involves a lot of research content. When I first entered school, I didn't have an answer to what path to choose to realize my ideal." Therefore, reading papers and listening to reports became his favorite things to do at that time. He was eager to quickly anchor his course in the sea of ​​books. But unexpectedly, "the road ahead is unclear, and the typhoon comes first." Since Hong Kong is located on the southeast coast of my country, there are almost several typhoons every summer, which not only puts local residents' travel under great test, but also troubles the problem of household electricity. At an academic group meeting, Wang Chong's doctoral supervisor, Professor Hou Yunhe, awakened this young man who was walking in the fog with one word: "Can the impact of these extreme weather disasters, including typhoons, on the power system be included in the research?" The sudden sense of enlightenment after the clouds and fog were shrouded Wang Chong for a while, and also aroused his interest hidden deep in his heart. "It would be great if I could use what I have learned to help people around me solve real problems in life." Suddenly, he felt as if he had touched the true meaning of scientific research.

Since then, Wang Chong has devoted himself to the research of power system resilience and elasticity, insisting on a sense of urgency and a sense of responsibility of "always worrying about it", taking multiple measures and being ready to develop various typhoon-resistant power supply technologies. During his doctoral studies and postdoctoral research at Iowa State University in the United States, he successively participated in research projects such as the Hong Kong Funding Bureau of China, the United States Electric Power Research Institute, the United States Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation of the United States, and accumulated rich practical experience.

However, Wang Chong said that in addition to these quantifiable results, the most beneficial gain in his study was the realization that scientific research requires "being good at active discovery" and "being good at active thinking". "In real life, many things can only be solved by looking beyond the phenomena and actively discovering and thinking about the problems." Just like his mentor is good at thinking, he still remembers the example of pointing out the way forward for his scientific research. "Today, I often reflect on why I didn't realize these truths at the beginning, which also reflects the importance of these two abilities for researchers." The distance is still far, and the road is still long. Always holding a heart of "being good at active discovery" and "being good at active thinking" is still Wang Chong's strict requirement for himself, and it is also his earnest expectation for future technological breakthroughs.

“Thinking about industry issues while running”

Besides scientific research, Wang Chong loves running. In the eyes of others, it seems to be just a dynamic process with the whistling of wind in his ears, but the dripping sweat will make him feel the value of hard work, and it can also relieve the pressure of work until his mind is calm and his thoughts are calm. In 2018, he returned to his alma mater, ready to open a new chapter in his career with a brand new look and high-spirited attitude. At this time, the situation of "racing" against disasters has become more and more urgent. In 2005, Typhoon "Davi" caused serious damage to the power equipment of the Hainan power grid in my country, resulting in a rare large-scale power outage; in 2014, Typhoon "Seagull" destroyed the power grid in some parts of southern my country, affecting more than 4 million users; in recent years, the frequency of extreme disasters has gradually increased... Many countries and international organizations have issued important annual reports or white papers, revealing that the energy system needs to have sufficient resilience when dealing with extreme disaster events. While all these things make Wang Chong, who is in the industry, feel worried, they also make him feel that the responsibility on his shoulders has become heavier.

Therefore, with the help of the National Development and Reform Commission's proposal in 2015 to "strengthen energy interconnection and promote the optimization and complementarity of multiple energy sources", and the further proposal of the guiding opinions on the interconnected energy supply system the following year, Wang Chong realized that a key feature of the new power system is comprehensive energy complementarity. Therefore, he led the team to actively plan and launch the National Natural Science Foundation Youth Project "Research on the Resilience Strategy of Electricity-Natural Gas Integrated Energy System under Extreme Weather Events". In the project, he innovatively constructed a non-parameter-driven elastic evolution model system and a full-process elastic optimization scheduling strategy driven by random states, solving the problem of coordinating the evolutionary randomness with the model universality, and the problem of coordinating the decision complexity with the strategy efficiency.

When building a system elastic scheduling strategy, Wang Chong realized that obtaining the system state is an important prerequisite for building an elastic strategy. Extreme disaster events can cause large-scale information network failures, causing information network failures to change from the conventional "small range, single point" to "large range, multiple points and surfaces". When information in some areas is not observable, traditional state perception methods cannot be used directly, resulting in the inability to directly obtain the overall operating status of the system. The system operating status is the basis for building a system elastic strategy. Therefore, the "information in some areas is not observable" caused by extreme disasters poses a major challenge to building a system elastic strategy. Therefore, based on the Youth Fund Project, he successfully applied for the National Natural Science Foundation of China's general project "Research on state-driven AC/DC power-natural gas system elasticity strategy under partial unobservability".

In addition, whether it is "real-time measures to enhance system resilience from the perspective of physical systems" or "real-time measures to enhance system resilience from the perspective of information network systems", they are all microcosms of Wang Chong's "race" with disasters to build a solid power supply barrier. He never stops. In the future, he said that he will continue to conduct in-depth research on the high proportion of renewable energy, multi-energy complementary integrated energy, high resilience, safety and reliability characteristics of new power systems, and from the perspective of the intersection of multiple fields such as power systems, integrated energy systems, random decision-making theory, and artificial intelligence methods, he will crack the key technologies of new power systems under the characteristics of information-physical fusion and high proportion of power electronics, so that the circuits that extend in all directions can not only provide timely assistance in fighting storm disasters, but also add icing on the cake for people's prosperous lives.