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