China’s ambitious new grid rules are designed to deliver more renewables

China’s new grid rules are designed to ensure that more renewables will be delivered IMAGE©Xinhua

China’s latest Five-Year Plan aims to actually absorb all the new renewable energy it continues to add each year. (A surge in CSP plants among them)

Renewables have been built faster than the grid can absorb. In 2025 alone, China curtailed an estimated 360 TWh of intermittent power – up 49% from 2024.

This under-utilization of existing new energy has brought new attention to transmission bottlenecks in China’s grid system.

A 50% Clean Energy Requirement for New UHV Lines

“China now has a specific requirement: all new UHV DC lines must carry at least 50% renewable energy. It’s a very ambitious goal,” Global Energy Monitor researcher, Ye Huang told SolarPACES.

This would be a very big change, she noted. “I did a calculation for all 20 operating UHV DC lines in China: the percentage of wind and solar across all those 20 lines was around 21% as of the end of 2024. We don’t have data for 2025 yet. But this percentage didn’t really change for the past four years, in 2021 it was already 19.8%. So in the past four years this percentage almost never changed.”

The new Five-Year Plan has introduced integration mandates for each region to bring down these curtailment rates. These mandates are differentiated, depending on each region’s current curtailment levels, ranging from 5% to 15%.

A history of thinking big

China has long had big ambitions for transporting massive amounts of electricity vast distances. In 2016, GEIDCO, a subsidiary that began literally within the same building as China’s State Grid in Beijing, proposed the idea of developing a grid spanning the globe to connect the entire world.

“The vision is to integrate more renewables, so you can put a lot of solar in desert areas and send it to the places where it’s needed,” said solar policy researcher Alina Gilmanova in a call from Beijing at that time, about her paper, detailing how the idea could benefit concentrated solar: The Role of Concentrated Solar Power in the Internet of Energy.

If that idea of a global electric grid sounds like pie in the sky to Western ears, consider that we do already have such a global “cooperative” already. Cables do cross continents and travel under the sea making it possible to connect every nation to make the internet a globally shared utility.

Highest and furthest voltage transmission globally

In the meantime, within its own borders, China already has already installed the world’s most extensive network of high voltage AC and HVDC at a scale and at a degree of technical advancement that dwarfs the rest of the world’s grid technology.

Its own planned nationwide super grid will connect six regional grids bringing fast-growing wind and solar from the north and west to its densely populated eastern cities. China invested $65 billion in 2018 and plans $65 billion each year for the next five to build up to 20 ultra HVDC lines in the 800-kV to 1100-kV range.

These HVDC and Ultra-High Voltage (UHV) direct current (DC) lines travel extremely long distances. The longest one currently operating sends power from Xinjiang in Northwest China, to the Eastern Anhui Province, an industrial and new energy manufacturing hub with a high power demand that lies more than 3,000 kilometers away.

This is the Changji-Guquan UHVDC Link in China, the longest and highest voltage (1,100 kV) line in the world.

China’s grid planning is developed in consultation with the grid companies, mainly State Grid, the largest, to make sure the goal is practical and feasible; that the grid can take so much capacity. The grid companies have a lot to say in this process.

To date, these lines have only transmitted from the sending end to the receiving end without stops in between. It is not practical for these extremely long UHV lines to pick up additional power from multiple additional energy suppliers along the way. Although the massive Talatan Solar Park is 21 GW, it is an outlier. Nearly all the solar parks built with CSP included are a standardized 1GW.

But Huang noted that she sees the technology developing to allow picking up from new energy sources on the route:

“Some of the lines that are operating or under construction are using a new technology: instead of conventional UHV DC, the technology is called VSC-HVDC (Voltage Source Converter HVDC), which can help them set up one or two stops along the way.”

China is five years ahead of the international Paris targets with 35% electrification of final energy consumption, due in part to its massive network of fast trains, many scheduled every half hour, and high rate of EV adoption (over half of all EVs globally).

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. With its high curtailment rate there is potential for much greater utilization of clean energy if the grid is upgraded to deliver every megawatt that has already been built.

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