The Rise of a Digital Backbone: Hainan Power Grid & Huawei Build 100G OTN to Create a Benchmark for Island Power Grids

The Hainan Free Trade Port—China's initiative to turn its southern island province into a global trade hub—is seeing rapid development. As a result, industries are demanding more electricity to support their upgrade to new operational paradigms like grid-computing integration and AI-driven grid management. At the same time, Hainan faces serious challenges such as frequent typhoons and heavy rain. Together, these factors are fueling the demand for a highly reliable, island-wide communication network.

The digital transformation of Hainan Power Grid Company—the operator of Hainan power grids and a subsidiary of China Southern Power Grid—is further intensifying this demand, with bandwidth-intensive applications such as intelligent remote device inspection and uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) patrols increasingly critical to operations. The trouble is, the existing communication infrastructure, heavily reliant on SDH and 10G OTN technologies, is struggling to keep up. Outdated network architectures and limited access points can no longer support the high-bandwidth, low-latency requirements of Hainan's next-generation power systems.

To overcome these challenges, Hainan Power Grid Company has collaborated with Huawei to deploy a new, robust 100G OTN network using WDM technology. This advanced solution is built on top of the existing 10G OTN infrastructure, creating a unified, province-wide backbone designed to meet the soaring bandwidth demands of aggregated data services. It optimizes the entire architecture and establishes a power communication transmission network that seamlessly connects all county-level services. In particular, the network delivers exceptional service quality, enhanced security, and superior reliability—all while ensuring a smooth evolution path for future technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide the deterministic, high-performance connectivity required in the AI era, so as to lay a future-proof digital foundation for a smarter grid.

Through this partnership, Hainan Power Grid has achieved at least a tenfold increase in overall communication transmission capacity across the province. Better yet, its innovative unified optical network platform has set a new industry benchmark for building a new type of power system. This milestone represents more than just a technological breakthrough and comprehensive infrastructure upgrade for Hainan; it lays out a blueprint for island-scale power systems worldwide to achieve high reliability, resilience, and intelligence.

Architecture diagram of Hainan Power Grid's N×100G transmission network

Five Major Technological Breakthroughs
Building a Next-Generation Communication Backbone for the Power Grid

In this phase of the Hainan Power Grid project, the provincial network is upgraded from N×10G to N×100G, providing comprehensive coverage for both the provincial dispatch center and all municipal/county dispatch centers. It also extends the network to substations across the island to help build a fully integrated network. Upon completion, the expanded network will encompass a total of 30 sites and connect 17 access points.

As well as fulfilling the business need to transition from GE to 10GE channels for aggregated data network nodes, this upgrade also provides the flexible bandwidth foundation to meet future demands for bandwidth-intensive digital services such as voice/video LANs and digital twin substations. The project's technological leadership and innovation are demonstrated in the following key areas:

• The implementation of 100G digital coherent reception technology provides the 100G OTN system with exceptional tolerance to chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion. This eliminates the need for complex dispersion compensation planning, ensuring superior transmission performance.

• To cope with Hainan's frequent thunderstorms, the project uses a lightning-resistant technology with enhanced polarization stability for 100G optical communication. It effectively reduces the incidence of lightning strikes on optical fiber composite overhead ground wires (OPGWs) to an acceptable level. Consequently, even in extreme weather conditions, communication service quality remains within the strict operational limits.

• The project uses the transmission self-healing protection mechanism by establishing a novel dual-ring interconnected architecture. This ensures that each site maintains at least two diverse business routes to both the provincial dispatch center and local backup centers. In emergency situations, this architecture enables comprehensive business protection and uninterrupted communication across the entire island.

• Each site employs OTN devices featuring pure electrical cross-connect technology. This technology converts optical wavelengths in electrical signals for switching and signal regeneration. It achieves digital cross-connection and management with SDH-like flexibility.

• The network leverages Raman amplification and forward error correction (FEC) for long-distance transmission, so as to support various services such as automated dispatch, video surveillance, and environmental monitoring. It enables flexible bandwidth adjustment and efficient service aggregation to meet a wide range of user requirements for bandwidth and latency.

• The dual-ring interconnected architecture, combined with electrical cross-connect at each site, facilitates bidirectional services and tunable wavelength-based point-to-point routing. This setup supports full-site route selection, meeting the needs of island power grid service access and emergency support.

Hainan Power Grid's 100G transmission networking equipment

Capability Enhancements in Four Key Areas
Fueling the Digital and Intelligent Transformation of Island Power Grids

The high-speed N×100G OTN transmission network, jointly developed by Hainan Power Grid Company and Huawei, serves as a benchmark for the digital and intelligent transformation of power systems within China Southern Power Grid and for island-based grids globally. It has the following advantages:

• Supporting high penetration of renewable energy integration: With increasing wind and solar power capacity in Hainan's evolving power system, the high-speed network transports real-time data from renewable energy plants. This enables accurate generation forecasting and dispatch to ensure grid stability and increase renewable energy consumption.

• Integrating operations across generation, grid, load, and storage: The network allows real-time data acquisition and remote control for substations, renewable plants, and distribution and consumption systems. It ensures rapid, accurate data exchange across generation, grid, load, and storage segments. This integration enables holistic grid monitoring and precise load control, improving the overall operational efficiency and flexibility of the power system.

• Accelerating intelligent grid development: Intelligent grid applications require reliable communication among numerous intelligent devices. The high-speed transmission network provides the backbone connectivity for smart meters, intelligent substations, and other devices to support real-time monitoring and intelligent control across the grid.

• Adapting to diversified power industry needs: The network is designed to meet high transmission requirements for emerging applications such as distributed energy resource management and electric vehicle charging infrastructure, driving diversification and innovation in grid services.

A Digital Artery for Power Communication
Unlocking a New Era of Smart Free Trade

This project establishes a high-performance digital artery for Hainan's energy transition. It delivers millisecond-level transmission for offshore wind, solar, and other intermittent renewables, increasing the new energy consumption rate to over 98%. Through its all-electric cross-connect architecture and Automatically Switched Optical Network (ASON), the system also enables real-time coordination across generation, grid, load, and storage. It also delivers precise, intelligent control of over 100,000 distributed energy resources and electric vehicle charging stations.

The high-speed network provides 100G access to 200 intelligent substations to improve inspection efficiency tenfold and reduce fault response to minutes. This helps to accelerate the shift toward unattended operations and centralized remote control.

The solution guarantees premium power quality for high-profile events such as the Boao Forum for Asia and space launches at Wenchang, while also ensuring highly reliable everyday electricity for residential, commercial, and industrial users. Such reliability underpins the region's stable economic and social development.

With continuously upgraded optical communication infrastructure, the grid now provides deterministic low-latency and high-security connectivity for AI-driven grid applications. Supported by Huawei, Hainan Power Grid has successfully transitioned from traditional power transmission to a system that integrates generation, grid, load, and storage, with multi-energy complementarity at its core, lighting the way toward an intelligent and resilient future for the Hainan Free Trade Port.