As the critical part connecting main grid and renewable energy systems, microgrid shows great market potential, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5% during 2012-2020 said MarketResearch. And the revenue of microgrid will reach $40 billion in 2020 from $10 billion this year, according to Navigant Research.
With worldwide countries increasingly focusing on renewable energy, requirements for high-quality, reliable and safe power supply gains traction. But renewable energy system presents an unstable power supply, and has to enter main grid via DC – AC transformation mechanism; the increase of applications would lead to voltage floating and bad frequency stability of the main grid, which requires the installation of microgrid.
Microgrid is isolated from any grid disturbance or outage, asks for fewer technical skills to operate and relies more on automation. Furthermore, microgrid perfects the use of renewable energy, largely reducing emission, earth pressure, as well as provides more reliable power supply…
Currently, North America especially the United States is the largest geography in terms of microgrid installed capacity. It is reported recently the US has issued the microgrid research plan in 2013 to 2015. Europe and Japan are also accelerating the building of microgrid to make use of the increased renewable energy. But across the globe, APAC region will be the fastest growing region, especially China, and India lead the way and market.
The promising outlook of microgrid brings new opportunities to related semiconductor industry as well. For instance, the power conversion and control equipment in the microgrid must introduce thousand-volt high voltage-endured power semiconductor, topology supporting real and virtual power compensation and LVRT function as well as high-level pulse width modulation (
PWM) control components.
In addition, the microgrid infrastructure also has to rely on power line communication (PLC) technology, ZigBee or wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) communication modules, real-time monitoring and return of regional electricity, renewable energy and energy storage system power information to achieve power distribution, smart management efficiency of microgrid. All told, another large wave of business opportunity is around the corner.
Tags：
microgrid, renewable energy, semiconductor growth