Gridlock in China: spending on network surges to support green energy transition

China’s electricity grid is set for an unparalleled investment of more than $800bn in the next six years to overcome strains on the energy system as the country makes a rapid shift from coal power to renewable sources.

China’s creaking grid represents a major constraint to progress on its green energy transition. During the first four months of this year alone, China invested Rmb122.9bn ($17bn) in its power grid projects, a 24.9 per cent year-on-year increase. That compares with the $3.5bn announced last October by US President Joe Biden’s administration, which covers 58 projects across 44 states.

China’s forecast capital expenditure is set to rise from about $102bn this year to $157bn by 2030, according to data from research group Rystad Energy.

Despite China’s huge spending programme, there are signs of increasing pressure on the distribution and transmission of electricity. Over the past year, more than 100 counties and cities in five provinces have suspended new small-scale solar operations from connecting to distribution lines.

At least 12 of China’s 34 province-level administrations have either encouraged or demanded solar operators use battery storage to ease the burden on the local grid, demonstrating that limits have been reached in many regions.

Yunnan, the debt-ridden south-western province, is facing a potential shortfall of about 10 per cent in power supply this year despite doubling the installed capacity of renewable energy last year, according to local media reports.

The situation is similar in Qinghai, in the country’s north-west, where most of the power generated by the region’s solar farms is wasted during the day. The province is forced to purchase power from coal-fired power stations in neighbouring provinces to meet demand in the evening.

“The current level of spending is not catching up with how fast China’s solar and wind new capacity additions are growing,” said Xuyang Dong, a China energy analyst at think-tank Climate Energy Finance.

Over the past decade, China has accounted for more than a third of the world’s transmission grid expansion. Globally, the country has the highest proportion of transmission lines that are less than 10 years old, the International Energy Agency reported.

That includes more than 500,000km of lines connecting its western and northern provinces, which are rich in energy resources, and the biggest demand centres in the east.

Power needed for artificial intelligence, data centres and electric vehicles are accelerating a longer-term rise in electricity’s share of energy use — up from 12 per cent in 2006 to 19 per cent in 2023, Dong noted.

Electricity demand growth in the first four months of 2024 was 7.4 per cent year on year, ahead of first-quarter GDP growth of 5.2 per cent.

“With the increasing electricity demand due to ‘electrification of everything’ . . . it is essential for China to prioritise power grid building, upgrading and modernisation, as well as deploying enough battery storage capacity, in order to plateau coal-use in the near future,” she added.

Against this backdrop, Beijing has again increased spending on the electricity grid hardware and the software and market systems to efficiently deliver power to the country’s 1.4bn people.

President Xi Jinping has laid down a dual target of China reaching peak carbon emissions in 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. Overcoming the grid constraints will be crucial if those demands are to be met.

Despite this acceleration, Fitch Ratings forecast that in the short term, China’s solar and wind power curtailment rates would rise as the aggressive speed of renewable energy additions outpaced upgrades to the power system.

China accounted for 65 per cent of global wind capacity in 2023 and 60 per cent of global solar capacity, according to research group Wood Mackenzie.

Fitch analysts noted that as renewable energy capacity additions continued to break records, solar curtailment rates at a national level had doubled in the first quarter of this year to 4 per cent.

Ken Liu, head of China renewables, utilities and energy research at UBS, said a critical challenge was the improvement of the dispatch system, or software that controls electricity flows to residential, commercial and industrial users.

Liu expects as much as 15 per cent of China’s total grid capital spending to be allocated to this software. Another 15 per cent will go to ultra-high voltage lines, 30 per cent to local level distribution systems and the remaining 40 per cent to building more transmission lines, he estimated.

“The grid has to be more advanced,” he said. “From a demand perspective, electrification has happened faster than a lot of people expected . . . and AI development is much faster than people expected.”

But Liu also warned that China was battling years-long delays for supplies of transformers, a switch that allows voltage to be stepped up or down.

The share prices of two top companies in the sector, Sieyuan Electric and Shanghai Huaming Power Equipment, have surged more than 600 per cent and 300 per cent in the past five years, respectively.

“It turns out that it is difficult to make these transformers . . . everything has to be tailor made,” he said. “This transformer order delay is longer than [waiting times for world leading] Nvidia’s chips.”

A boom in energy storage, mostly through large battery packs for grid-level storage, should also alleviate the supply-demand mismatch on China’s grid over the long term. Goldman Sachs analysts have forecast a 70-fold increase in battery storage in 2030 from 2021 levels.

Climate Energy Finance analyst Dong also pointed out that a “notable shift” had taken place in the scale of solar in China last year.

Utility-scale solar rose to 120GW from 36GW the year before, overtaking smaller-scale distributed solar — mostly rooftops — which grew to 96GW from 52GW. Over time, this shift is expected to further alleviate some pressure from local electricity distribution systems.

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