Zenith Steel Group (Nantong) Co lights up at night. [Photo/Nantong Daily]

The Zenith Steel Group (Nantong) Co in Jiangsu province recently made the national list of the standard industrial eco-friendly micro-grid application cases in 2023 released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

After a comprehensive review, the ministry believes that Zenith's micro-grid can be widely applied to the industrial realm of smelting and pressing of ferrous metals.

Addressing large energy consumption, the Nantong steel enterprise invested 1.8 billion yuan ($251.95 million) in building a micro-grid, which includes distributed photovoltaic panels, a sintering waste heat generator set, blast furnace gas residual pressure generator set, as well as a supporting intelligent energy control system.

The company's rooftop distributed PV project, the largest in the province, was connected to the national grid and started generating electricity earlier last year. The first phase spans over 700,000 square meters.

Employing advanced control and testing systems, the two generator sets feature high degrees of automation, high resource recovery rates, and ultra-low exhaust gas emissions.

In 2023, the micro-grid generated about 3.9 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, which is expected to reduce consumption by nearly 480,000 tons of standard coal and the emission of over 2.21 million tons of carbon dioxide.