Customer Stories / Energy and Utilities

2024
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Hanwha Qcells Builds a Virtual Power Plant Platform in 3 Months Using AWS

Discover how Hanwha Qcells built a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) platform in just three months with AWS IoT Core and Amazon EventBridge, optimizing renewable energy management for the Korean market.

3 Months

To develop a Virtual Power Plant in Korea

1 Week

To implement provisioning, monitoring, and control

Overview

Hanwha Qcells is a total energy solutions company that provides solar and renewable energy services. To expand its operations in Korea, Hanwha Qcells sought to develop a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) that could integrate and manage renewable power resources efficiently.

By working closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hanwha Qcells successfully built the VPP platform in just three months. The platform enhances energy management and allows the company to scale its renewable energy efforts while maintaining efficiency and driving operational improvements.

Hanwha Qcells

Opportunity | Expanding Renewable Energy Business for a Sustainable Future

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.

kr_quotemark

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.”

HeeLa Park
Vice President at Hanwha Qcells

Solution | Building the VPP Platform for the Domestic Market in Three Months

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."

Architecture Diagram

Outcome | Achieving Real-Time Monitoring and Optimized Operations in Under a Week

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.”

Learn More

To learn more, visit Hanwha Qcells


About Hanwha Qcells

Hanwha Qcells provides end-to-end energy solutions, from solar modules to renewable power plant development and power trading. The company’s Virtual Power Plant (VPP) business connects renewable sources like solar and wind, managing them as a single network. Hanwha Qcells supplies solar modules and Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) in Europe and Australia and has expanded its Q.OMMAND system to optimize energy management in Korea, participating in the Jeju Pilot Project to support renewable energy trading.

AWS Services Used

Amazon EventBridge

Learn how EventBridge makes it easier to build event-driven applications at scale using events generated from your applications, integrated SaaS applications, and AWS services.

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AWS IoT Core

Connect, manage, and scale your device fleets easily and reliably without provisioning or managing servers.

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Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises data centers.

Learn more »

Amazon Simple Queue Service

Learn about how first-in-first-out (FIFO) queues help make sure the messages you send to systems are published in the correct order.

Learn more »

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