Since the beginning of this year, we have been closely following the changes in the policy environment and electricity price mechanism of the new energy industry, especially the systematic reconstruction brought about by the accelerated opening up of the electricity market after the “531″ new policy. With the emergence of the mechanism electricity price as stipulated in Document No. 136, the full guaranteed purchase of new energy electricity is about to become history. Without policy guarantees, electricity prices will be determined by the market. Everyone is wondering whether investment in new energy can still make money.
In the past, when photovoltaic power was profitable, few people realized the value of professional tools and software. “Basically, we just applied mathematical formulas on Excel to make a rough estimate. It’s just a matter of making more or less money.” But now, the fixed electricity price has been changed to the market electricity price, and the revenue model of photovoltaic power generation has become history. The situation where “a single Excel table could handle everything no longer exists.” Now, at every stage of the project’s entire life cycle, we need to maximize the potential benefits that can be exploited and utilized. During this process, professional vertical AI applications and tools can greatly assist us in making the transition from “extensive” brute force to “refined” management.
There are numerous voices and diverse interpretations of Document No. 136 in the industry. In the era of the AI revolution, what thoughts and plans should we have for the future trends of the industry in the post-531 era? We conducted an in-depth interview with Vision Power Technology, a leading domestic vertical AI application pioneer in the energy industry. As a technology enterprise dedicated to promoting the deep integration of artificial intelligence technology and new energy, from the perspective of AI technology, combined with the large amount of actual project data generated and accumulated by platform tools, the following industry trend judgments have been summarized:
1.The era of “load supremacy” has arrived, and the costs of consumption and grid connection will be borne by the asset side and the power consumption side.
After the “531″ policy, the role of the power grid is undergoing a fundamental transformation, shifting from the original “full purchaser” to “market regulator”. The past when power station operators only cared about construction and did not consider the issue of consumption has become a thing of the past. With the continuous increase in the proportion of photovoltaic power generation, the power grid is under significant pressure, and the costs of system regulation and peak-valley difference management are increasing day by day. This cost will no longer be borne by the power grid but will gradually be transferred to project holders and energy-consuming entities. In the future, “who benefits, who bears” will become the mainstream mechanism. This places higher demands on project developers and end enterprises: they must fully understand their own power load characteristics, dispatching response capabilities and grid connection capabilities in order to truly achieve sustainable development and operation.
2.the value of photovoltaic projects is no longer solely determined by resources and rooftops; the real returns are determined by the ability of scheme design.
With the increasing uncertainty of electricity prices and the gradual decline of on-grid electricity prices, the traditional resource-oriented model of “occupying rooftops and competing for resources” is facing a collapse in premium. The certainty of future photovoltaic revenue depends more on two dimensions: one is the precise calculation of load and consumption capacity, and the other is the ability to optimize the revenue structure under energy storage configuration. This means that the traditional intermediary service role is gradually being marginalized, and relying solely on information no longer has commercial value. To achieve continuous returns, it is necessary to transform into a comprehensive service provider with the ability to design solutions, and demonstrate its own value by providing customers with one-stop solutions such as system design, energy management, and economic calculation. Design ability and systems thinking are becoming the core competitiveness of the new generation of service providers.
3. the compensation of the electricity price mechanism is no longer a window for excessive profits, but a bottom-line protection.
Under the background of the gradual marketization of mechanism electricity volume and mechanism electricity price, the nature of the policy compensation mechanism has changed – it is no longer a guarantee of high returns, but a “stop-loss tool” for risk hedging. If power station projects are to achieve high returns, they should not rely on the continuation of policy dividends, but rather rely on scientific allocation and technological optimization to build a stable profit model. This change urges the industry to return to the intrinsic value of the projects themselves, ensuring returns through more reasonable load adaptation, more efficient energy storage configuration and more intelligent dispatching systems, rather than relying on external policy compensation to “leverage up”.
4. the project development logic has undergone a fundamental transformation from “encircling the roof” to “encircling the load”.
In the past, the core of competition in distributed photovoltaic projects was to obtain “resources” : whoever could quickly secure the rooftop would take the initiative in the project. However, under the new market structure, resources themselves no longer equal value. Because not all roofs have high-quality load characteristics, nor can they achieve good local consumption. Therefore, the future development logic is “load pooling” : only those who can identify enterprise users with stable loads, distinct peak and off-peak periods, and large scheduling space can truly develop high-yield and high-security projects. This places higher demands on the data acquisition ability, energy consumption analysis ability and solution customization ability of project developers.
5. Enterprises participating in the electricity market need to build their own comprehensive energy dispatching system.
To endow their distributed energy assets with genuine market trading capabilities, enterprises must establish a “four-in-one” coordination mechanism integrating photovoltaic, energy storage, load, and power markets within the company. This not only requires hardware interconnection and interoperability at the equipment level, but also demands the establishment of a unified dispatching platform at the control level to achieve dynamic allocation of local power generation and consumption resources and real-time response to electricity price signals. In fact, enterprises need to build a small microgrid to achieve self-generation and self-consumption, autonomous dispatching and precise management. The construction of this system will bring higher energy independence and market participation capabilities to enterprises, and also lay the foundation for the subsequent realization of virtual power plant capabilities.
6.Virtual power plants are the future destination of distributed energy systems, which puts forward higher requirements for the early model capabilities.
The ultimate form of distributed energy is aggregation – that is, through virtual power plant (VPP) technology, scattered power generation resources (such as photovoltaic, energy storage) and power consumption resources (load response, flexible load) are integrated into a whole with dispatching capabilities, and they uniformly participate in transactions and services in the power market. Virtual power plants not only improve the utilization efficiency of resources, but also significantly enhance market competition and profit space. But the prerequisite for all this is to have high-precision prediction and modeling capabilities at the project design stage. The traditional method of relying on Excel for static measurement can no longer support the system optimization with multi-dimensional, multi-scenario and highly dynamic features. AI modeling, dynamic simulation, and multi-scenario analysis will become the fundamental capabilities for project evaluation and decision-making in the VPP era.
In summary, with the increasing maturity of China’s power market mechanism and the advent of the post-531 era, the photovoltaic energy storage industry has entered a deep transformation period from resource-driven to load-driven, from static deployment to intelligent dispatching, and from single-point construction to system coordination. The main challenge faced by industrial and commercial users is no longer merely the issue of whether to install or not, but rather how to maximize the value and minimize the risks of energy assets under the backdrop of fluctuating electricity prices, restricted consumption, grid constraints and increasingly strict policies.
Post time: Jun-11-2025