China Southern Power Grid (南方电网)

Solution

China Southern Power Grid and Alibaba Cloud transformed the utility's dispatch platform from a concentrated architecture into a distributed cloud foundation and then added a supercomputing layer for AI- and weather-intensive workloads. The dispatch cloud uses multi-region design, unified identity and monitoring, hierarchical operations, and distributed stream, batch, and AI processing so grid data can be modeled instead of sitting idle on disk. On top of that base, the utility built a cloud-native SCADA platform that can expand compute resources in seconds, process more than sixty thousand messages per second, and deploy the whole system in about seventy seconds. In 2021 it also launched the power sector's first dispatch-cloud supercomputing platform on Apsara and Shenlong infrastructure, which gave the grid elastic high-performance compute for fine-grained weather prediction, typhoon response, spot-market clearing, and new-energy power forecasting. The combined platform turns dispatch, forecasting, and market operations into one data-driven AI control plane.

Data flow

Dispatch, market, and operational telemetry is ingested into the distributed dispatch cloud, where streaming, batch, and AI services analyze and model grid behavior. The results feed cloud-native SCADA for real-time operations and the supercomputing layer for heavy tasks such as weather prediction, power-market clearing, and new-energy forecasting before dispatch teams act on the outputs.