Huawei Releases All-New Smart String Grid-Forming Energy Storage Platform!

<p>50 million people left in the dark. 8 million people lost power. Over the past year, large-scale blackouts have occurred one after another in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Chile. These accidents seemingly happened in different countries, but the underlying problems are very similar: <strong>renewable energy is rapidly becoming the primary power source, but the power grid is not yet fully prepared.</strong></p><p>Consequently, a term that used to be discussed only within technical circles has begun to appear frequently: Grid-Forming. It is against this very industry backdrop that <strong>Huawei's newly released next-generation smart string grid-forming energy storage platform, LUTERRA™</strong>, made its debut.</p><p><img src="https://di8026cal0d.feishu.cn/space/api/box/stream/download/asynccode/?code=ZDI5YWJjN2Y3NmZhYTZhYjEyYTU1ODJhY2IyNjhhMzNfbzNkRG9vTU5neUNnU1VWeGVianNWTnFhMlJwM3B1MjZfVG9rZW46VFh5MWJwd3Fzb2RxU0J4dks4WGNsWHM4blVlXzE3ODIzNTU1NTU6MTc4MjM1OTE1NV9WNA&amp;add_watermark=true&amp;scene_type=CCM" alt="" loading="lazy" decoding="async" /></p><h2><strong>01 Starting from Blackout Events, the Global Power Grid is Entering a New Phase</strong></h2><p>Over the past decade or so, the most important task for the global renewable energy industry was to scale up installed capacity. Cumulative solar PV capacity continued to grow, wind power accelerated its expansion, and newly installed energy storage capacity repeatedly shattered records. Renewable energy has grown from a supplementary energy source into a vital component of the power system. However, as the proportion of renewable energy keeps rising, the issue of power grid stability has begun to surface.</p><p>In April 2025, Spain and Portugal suffered one of their most severe, widespread blackout accidents in recent years. Within just a few seconds, the Iberian Peninsula power grid lost over approximately 15GW of generation capacity, plunging a massive number of cities into darkness. Railway systems halted, airport flights were disrupted, and communication networks experienced anomalies, affecting more than 50 million people.</p><p>When the accident occurred, the share of renewable energy in the Spanish power grid was already close to 60%. Although the causes of the accident are highly complex and the industry is still continuously conducting research and analysis, this event has forced the entire European energy industry to refocus on one question: as synchronous generators become fewer and power electronic equipment becomes more prevalent, how will the future power grid maintain stable operation.</p><p>Similar problems have also appeared in South America. In February 2025, a fault in northern Chile's transmission system triggered a nationwide, large-scale blackout. Multiple regions, including the capital Santiago, were affected, leaving over 8 million users without power supply. Subways ground to a halt, traffic lights failed, and the government even went as far as declaring a state of emergency at one point.</p><p>Meanwhile, in Brazil, with the share of wind and solar power continuously rising, the national grid operator has also been steadily strengthening its research on system inertia, frequency stability, and renewable energy grid-connection support capabilities in recent years, while driving the deployment and application of energy storage and novel grid-support technologies.</p><p>Although these events have different root causes, they all point to the same reality: <strong>renewable energy has already solved the problem of "being able to generate power," but as renewable energy progressively becomes the primary power source, the industry is entering the phase of whether it can "stay stable."</strong></p><h2><strong>02 Grid-Forming is Everywhere, Becoming the New Infrastructure of the Renewable Energy Era</strong></h2><p>In traditional power systems, synchronous generators such as thermal power and hydropower naturally possess inertia support, voltage support, and frequency support capabilities. In the past, these capabilities seemed to be taken for granted, but as the proportion of renewable energy continuously increases and synchronous generators gradually exit the system, the foundation upon which the power grid relies for stable operation is undergoing a change.</p><p><strong>Thus, grid-forming technology has walked into the center of the industry stage.</strong></p><p>Grid-forming technology enables renewable energy equipment, such as energy storage, solar PV, and wind power, to possess capabilities similar to traditional synchronous generators. They no longer just "follow the grid," but can actively establish and support the grid. When system frequency fluctuations occur, they can <strong>actively provide inertia support</strong>; when voltage disturbances happen, they can <strong>actively offer voltage support</strong>; even in weak grid or off-grid scenarios, they can still <strong>maintain stable system operation</strong>. For the future novel power system with renewable energy as the mainstay, grid-forming capability is no longer an optional choice, but is gradually becoming a foundational capability.</p><p>As Tao Zhou, President of Huawei Digital Power Smart PV Product Line, put it: "The power system will transition toward a novel power system dominated by solar and storage, where grid-forming and AI innovation are the keys to cracking the dilemmas of system stability and balance." In fact, grid-forming does not only exist within energy storage. <strong>Future solar PV, wind power, energy storage, charging infrastructure, and even AI data centers will step-by-step possess grid-forming capabilities, together constituting the next generation of energy infrastructure.</strong> From this perspective, the significance of grid-forming has already gone far beyond a certain single technological innovation; it is becoming the "underlying capability" of the renewable energy era.</p><p>And this is precisely the important industry background behind <strong>Huawei's launch of LUTERRA, the next-generation smart string grid-forming energy storage platform.</strong></p><h2><strong>03 Entering the Grid-Forming Era, the Logic of Competition Has Changed</strong></h2><p>If it is said that the core of competition in the energy storage industry in the past was larger capacity and lower costs, then after entering the grid-forming era, the focus of customer attention has started to shift toward these questions: <strong>How to build faster? How to achieve higher returns? How to support stable grid operation? How to ensure safety across the entire life cycle?</strong></p><p>Centering around these questions, Huawei launched the LUTERRA platform. Compared with traditional energy storage products, its design logic is no longer confined to expanding capacity or cutting costs, <strong>but carries out systemic upgrades around construction efficiency, profitability, grid-forming capability, and safety capability.</strong></p><h2><strong>04 The Five Major Technological Innovations of LUTERRA</strong></h2><p>▍<strong>Adopting a 1000Vac smart string architecture.</strong> At the hardware level, LUTERRA adopts a 1000Vac smart string architecture and is equipped with a new generation of SiC power devices. By improving system conversion efficiency and battery consistency, it further unleashes the performance of the entire station.</p><p>▍<strong>First-of-its-kind continuous busbar architecture design.</strong> At the system design level, this new product adopts a continuous busbar architecture, which further simplifies the installation, wiring, and later expansion processes. This not only shortens the project delivery cycle but also helps reduce land footprint and construction costs.</p><p>▍<strong>In thermal design, adopting a smart distributed heat dissipation design.</strong> Aiming at the heat dissipation issues generally scrutinized during the long-term operation of energy storage systems, this new product adopts a smart distributed heat dissipation design, increasing the heat dissipation area by 100%. Higher heat dissipation efficiency means fans do not need to run at high speeds for long periods, which effectively reduces equipment noise while safeguarding system stability, making it more suitable for deployment in European commercial, industrial, and near-residential scenarios.</p><p>▍<strong>In station-level grid-forming technology, achieving synchronous grid-forming for tens of millions of devices, self-adapting to grid strength changes.</strong> This means that the energy storage system no longer just possesses grid-forming capability on an individual device level, but can participate in grid support at the entire station level and even across multi-device collaborative dimensions.</p><p>▍<strong>Introducing digital capabilities into energy storage operations, relying on a unique digital twin platform.</strong> The system can more accurately predict the State of Energy (SOE) and State of Power (SOP) of the energy storage power station, providing data support for electricity trading, revenue optimization, and asset operations, thereby further enhancing full life-cycle value.</p><h2><strong>05 Four Core Values: Fast Construction, High Yield, Grid Stability, and Safety</strong></h2><p>▍<strong>In terms of construction efficiency, one of the biggest changes is the shift from single-device optimization to station-level optimization.</strong> Huawei pioneered the 1000Vac smart string architecture and adopted a continuous busbar design to further shorten the project delivery cycle by reducing cables, lowering system complexity, and optimizing construction processes. According to data provided by Huawei, taking a 1GWh energy storage power station as an example, the overall delivery time from construction to grid connection can be shortened by about 30%, and the BOP costs, including land leasing, cables, construction, and labor, can be reduced by more than 20%. For the current European market, this kind of value might be far more important than purely increasing efficiency by a few percentage points. After all, against the backdrop of continuously rising costs for land, grid connection resources, and labor, whether a project can be put into operation faster often directly determines the level of return on investment.</p><p>▍<strong>Profitability determines the profit margin of an energy storage project for the next 20 years.</strong> What Huawei highlights this time is not a single indicator, but rather enhancing the discharge capacity of the entire station from multiple dimensions, including Round-Trip Efficiency (RTE), system availability rate, battery consistency, and SOC accuracy. In the process of energy storage project operation, seemingly minor differences in efficiency will be continuously amplified after thousands of cycles. Huawei's calculations show that taking a 12.5MW/50MWh energy storage power station as an example, over a 20-year life cycle, with one charge and discharge per day under a typical peak-valley arbitrage scenario, its full life-cycle discharge volume can be increased by more than 10% compared with traditional solutions, thereby bringing higher operational revenue to the project.</p><p>▍<strong>Even more worthy of attention is that Huawei is elevating grid-forming capability from the device level to the station level.</strong> It possesses station-level grid-forming capabilities such as short-circuit capacity support, wide-band oscillation suppression, inertia response, primary frequency regulation, black start, and grid-tied/off-grid switching. To some extent, the core of future competition in the energy storage industry will manifest not just in energy shifting, but also in the support capabilities for grid safety, frequency, voltage, and weak-grid operation.</p><p>▍<strong>In terms of safety, Huawei proposed a quite interesting concept this time, turning energy storage safety from empirical judgment into quantified evaluation.</strong> Huawei has established a full life-cycle safety quantified evaluation system for energy storage systems as well as a Risk Map (RMAP), continuously evaluating the system safety level through risk occurrence probability and impact severity. According to Huawei's definition, its grid-forming energy storage system has reached the C-level safety standard, meaning the overall risk level is lower than one in a million. This undoubtedly drives the upgrade of energy storage safety from empirical management to digitalized and quantified management.</p><h2><strong>06 Why Huawei Has the Confidence to Create the Next Generation of Energy Storage</strong></h2><p>Grid-forming right now is no longer a concept that stays in the laboratory. In recent years, more and more mega-scale projects have already begun to validate the actual value of grid-forming technology. One of the most representative cases is the 100% renewable energy city-level microgrid project located in the Red Sea New City, Saudi Arabia. This project is configured with 400MW of solar PV and a 1.3GWh energy storage system, utilizing grid-forming technology to enable renewable energy to run as the primary power source and provide stable power supply for the entire city. This not only validates the capability of solar-storage systems to support grid operation in high-penetration renewable energy scenarios but also proves that grid-forming technology already possesses the conditions for large-scale commercial application.</p><p>In addition to this, Huawei's grid-forming technology has also achieved scaled implementation in multiple benchmark projects overseas. The 1.9GWh energy storage project in Chile became the first local demonstration project to meet the brand-new grid-forming grid codes; there is also the GW-level energy storage power station in Cambodia running stably over the long term, effectively improving local grid frequency fluctuation issues; the 581MWh grid-forming microgrid project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) achieved a power supply reliability rate of 99.9%, drastically improving the power supply level of the local weak grid.</p><p>As can be seen from these projects, grid-forming technology is no longer just a technical concept in the laboratory, but is being continuously validated in real-world scenarios such as high-penetration renewable energy, weak grids, and off-grid microgrids. When renewable energy moves from being a "supplementary power source" toward becoming the "primary power source," the value of energy storage is also being redefined. It is not just an energy moving tool, but an important support for the stable operation of the future power system. This is precisely where grid-forming energy storage platforms like LUTERRA are truly worth paying attention to—it is not just a new product, but a new stage for the energy storage industry moving from "competing on capacity" toward "competing on system capabilities."</p>