Overall energy investment levels in China are comparable to the amounts required to meet national energy and climate goals, although full alignment with the targets implies a rebalancing away from investments in fossil fuel supply, towards grids and the end-use sectors. World Energy Investment 2024 - Analysis and key findings.
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.
China has two wide area synchronous grids, the State Grid and the China Southern Power Grid. The northern power grids were synchronized in 2005. Since 2011 all Chinese provinces are interconnected. The two grids are joined by HVDC back-to-back connections.
its share is expected to rise to around 30% by 2035 in the NPS. China’s power system is the largest national power system in the world; it accounted for one quarter of global electricity consumption in 2017.
Tibet Power is the company that manages power in Tibet, and is controlled by the State Grid Corporation. The central government has made the creation of a unified national grid system a top economic priority to improve the efficiency of the whole power system and reduce the risk of localised energy shortages.
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.