Cipher News Cipher News

One morning in August, residents of the southern coastal Chinese city of Guangzhou woke up to an extraordinary sight: two enormous wind turbines atop one floating platform, like twin heads on the same neck, being towed out to sea.

A fleet of ships was hauling the turbines from the Nansha port to an offshore wind farm three days away in the South China Sea, according to the Chinese state broadcaster. Once up and running, the 16.6 megawatt (MW) twin-turbine platform, called OceanX, is expected to generate enough electricity to meet the annual power needs of 30,000 typical Chinese households, its manufacturer Ming Yang Smart Energy Group Limited said in a news release.

OceanX is the latest example of China’s determination to deploy massive amounts of renewable energy thanks to ambitious government support. Despite that backing, though, China is facing a challenge familiar to many other countries — how to upgrade the country’s infrastructure so it can actually use all that renewable capacity.

China’s grid was built for coal power, which generates electricity constantly, so it is struggling to adapt to wind and solar, which only generate power when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.

“The situation has led to more and more wind and solar power being curtailed in areas that have many mega wind and solar bases,” Yu Aiqun, a research analyst at Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, told Cipher.

Explosive growth

China’s wind and solar capacity ballooned after 2009, when the country started building its first solar farms. Thanks to consistent and ambitious government policies for more than a decade, the country hit its 2030 target of installing 1,200 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar power in July, more than six years ahead of schedule.

China’s efforts dwarf those of all other nations. In 2023, it installed 217 GW of new solar capacity, more than all the solar capacity the United States has ever installed in its history. The jump was due to the construction of enormous solar bases in deserts and a government-led campaign to mount panels on tens of thousands of rooftops across the country.

“The speed at which the solar power has been growing in recent years far outstrips the expectation of industry experts,” said Ran Ze, director of technological innovation at the Beijing office of the Environmental Defense Fund, an international nonprofit organization.

This year, another solar surge is almost guaranteed, as 125 GW of capacity has already been installed between January and July, according to statistics released by China’s National Energy Administration.

In comparison, wind power has grown more slowly because finding ideal sites for wind farms and transporting turbines is much harder, Ran said.

Still, last year China’s overall wind power capacity grew by 75.8 GW, accounting for nearly 65% of all the wind power capacity added across the globe in 2023. As of June, the country’s total wind capacity was 470 GW.

The many drivers

On the flip side of all that energy supply has been an explosion in demand. Last year, China used 9,224.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, more than twice what the U.S. used.

Between 2000 and 2023, China’s annual electricity consumption increased nearly sevenfold, and “this has created an opportunity of growth for all kinds of power capacity in order to meet the demand,” Hu Min, director and co-founder of the Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress, a Beijing-based think tank, told Cipher.

The Chinese central government responded by enacting sweeping policies to promote renewable energy, including a high-level law that established the importance of developing the industry as early as 2005, various schemes to encourage research and technological innovation, subsidies for companies building solar and wind farms and much more.

Beijing regarded the renewable industry as an opportunity to leapfrog its economy, leading it to launch a series of industrial policies to support companies manufacturing the wind and solar equipment as well.

Regional governments have also helped, sometimes reducing the approval time for major wind and solar projects from several years to a couple of months — just as they had done for coal power plants previously, said Yu of Global Energy Monitor.

Private money has also flowed into China’s renewables industry. When President Xi Jinping announced the country’s goal of reaching carbon neutrality before 2060, many felt it almost guaranteed a rapid expansion for the renewable industry this decade, drawing in more investors, Ran said.

“The biggest lesson is that renewable development benefits from stable government policies,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Washington, D.C.-based Asia Society Policy Institute. “China’s support … is consistent and long-term, which give investors a positive signal.”

The many challenges

Despite these successes, China’s energy transition is facing headwinds, especially when it comes to putting all its installed wind and solar fleets to work generating electricity for homes, businesses and factories.

Many economies — such as the U.S. and the European Union — are struggling with the same problem, but it seems more pronounced for China because its renewable capacity has been growing at such a breakneck speed, said Yang Muyi, a senior electricity policy analyst with London-based think tank Ember.

Even though wind and solar farms accounted for 36% of China’s total power capacity at the end of 2023, their generation only accounted for 15.5% of the country’s total power last year, per the China Electricity Council. Around 60% of China’s power still comes from coal plants.

The gap is caused by a mix of factors. For one, wind and solar energy is often most abundant when demand for electricity is low, such as in the afternoon. This means the power grid, which must match supply and demand in real time, cannot absorb excess wind and solar power. Wind and solar farms must either find ways to store or transmit their extra electricity or curtail their output by letting turbines and panels stay idle.

One solution is to use batteries — something the Chinese government has been pushing. “In many provinces, wind and solar projects are required to be paired with energy storage facilities to minimize curtailment,” Yang explained.

China has also been planning and building ultra-high-voltage power lines to send wind and solar power from the north and the northwest to its major cities hundreds of miles away on the eastern and southern coasts. But the government hasn’t planned enough lines and is building them too slowly, according to a recent report by Global Energy Monitor.

Yang agreed. He explained it is quicker to build a wind or solar farm than a power line — the former may take around two years, and the latter three to five years.

Even for China, there is no quick fix to solve the curtailment issue, he added. “A variety of measures are needed, from upgrading the grid to improving the power-trading market.”