Hanwha Qcells Builds a Virtual Power Plant Platform in 3 Months Using AWS

Hanwha Qcells (Qcells) is a total energy solutions company that covers everything from solar modules and systems to renewable energy power plant development, construction, and power trading. As renewable energy becomes increasingly important to address the global climate crisis, Qcells entered the virtual power plant (VPP) business, connecting renewable energy sources like solar and wind power to manage them as a single power plant. The company supplies residential solar modules to Europe and Australia and offers a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) that stores renewable energy and manages household distributed energy resources. It also provides Q.OMMAND, a cloud-based platform incorporating VPP capabilities, enabling households to effectively manage their energy generation, storage, and consumption.

The company sought to expand its business by building a VPP platform for the Korean market, utilizing various managed services on AWS in collaboration with the AWS Prototyping & Cloud Engineering (PACE) team. This VPP platform aimed to enable centralized control and monitoring of renewable power resources, allowing consumers to predict power consumption patterns and electricity prices.

Hanwha Qcells’ Q.OMMAND system provides energy control and monitoring for solar inverters and energy storage systems (ESS) across Europe and Australia. Building on this experience, Qcells developed Q.PLANET, a VPP platform tailored for the Korean market. By using AWS IoT Core, the company was able to integrate remote terminal units (RTUs) to monitor and control a range of devices in real-time, significantly simplifying complex device authentication processes. 

The AWS PACE team worked closely with Qcells, conducting architecture reviews and providing best practices for using AWS infrastructure during four-week sprints. The teams adopted a one-week sprint process to implement and test feedback immediately, enabling fast feature development. Amazon EventBridge streamlined scheduling tasks, reducing the time needed to set up jobs from weeks to just a few clicks. Hanwha Qcells also configured Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to ensure scalable and reliable job processing, with dead-letter queues (DLQ) to handle any potential system failures. 

HeeLa Park, vice president of Hanwha Qcells, says, "Collaborating with the AWS PACE team allowed us to quickly commercialize our business logic and build the VPP platform for domestic use in just three months. The synergy between our development team and AWS experts significantly accelerated our project."

The VPP platform developed by Qcells on AWS provides advanced capabilities, including power generation forecasting, plant monitoring, control functions, and system monitoring. To ensure efficient monitoring and control, Qcells implemented real-time device interactions, enabling the provisioning, monitoring, and control features in under a week—a timeline that typically spans several months.

KiHoon Lim, a lead software developer at Hanwha Qcells, explains, “AWS IoT Core made it simple to implement a complex device authentication system because it uses self-issued device certificates and does not require separate certificate chain management.” This simplification streamlined development, enabling the team to focus on other critical features of the VPP platform.

In addition to device management, the platform supports a scheduler for energy bidding and settlement tasks, including day-ahead bidding, real-time bidding, and early settlement. Lim noted, "The VPP platform can lead to financial losses if it fails during operation, so enhancing observability and planning for system resiliency are key priorities moving forward.”