China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the undisputed leader in renewable energy deployment, is facing an uncomfortable truth: building massive wind and solar farms does not automatically mean coal can be retired. Transmission bottlenecks, market design flaws, and a cautious new five-year plan are keeping fossil fuels firmly in the mix.
According to an analysis by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), China’s mega renewable energy bases, planned clusters of solar, wind, and storage facilities located mainly in the northern and western deserts, are struggling to get their power to the eastern industrial centers. The country’s ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission lines carry only about one-fifth of their electricity from wind and solar sources. Coal accounts for 42 percent of the power flowing through these lines.
The problem is not a lack of renewable capacity, but a lack of grid flexibility. Dispatch practices, electricity market arrangements, and long-term coal contracts all work against the integration of variable renewable energy. The result is growing curtailment, or forced shut-downs of wind and solar farms when the grid cannot absorb their output.
Transmission becomes the weak link
China’s new Five-Year Plan for the energy sector (2026-2030) aims to expand cross-regional transmission capacity from 340 GW to 420 GW. According to GEM, this is a modest increase equivalent to about ten new UHVDC lines. Earlier plans by State Grid to build fifteen new lines have not been fully included in the official plan, suggesting that transmission will remain a bottleneck for the megabases.
In response, provincial governments and project developers are shifting strategies. Instead of relying on long-distance transmission, they are trying to attract energy-intensive industries to locate near renewable energy sources. This trend is most visible in the autonomous battery storage sector and the green hydrogen boom.
– The shift toward autonomous storage and green hydrogen shows how the market is adapting to transmission constraints – stwierdzili analitycy Global Energy Monitor.
Green hydrogen and the race for local consumption
After the government removed mandatory storage requirements for new renewable projects in 2025 and introduced grid fees for autonomous storage in 2026, investment has shifted from co-located storage systems to independent battery projects connected to the grid. These projects earn revenue from system services and energy markets, providing round-the-clock power to industrial users.
China already has over 10 GW of wind and solar capacity dedicated to green hydrogen production, with an additional 53 GW in development. Most of these projects are concentrated in provinces with high renewable energy penetration and strong government support, such as Inner Mongolia, where about 12 percent of all utility-scale wind and solar potential is earmarked for hydrogen production.
Renewables as a cover for coal expansion?
GEM’s analysis highlights a worrying trend in the coal-to-chemicals sector. All new coal-to-olefins projects in northern and northwestern China include plans for green hydrogen production. Regulators increasingly require renewable integration as a condition for project approval. However, the renewable component often represents only a tiny fraction of total energy consumption.
– Baofeng Energy, the world’s largest coal-to-olefins producer, launched a flagship project in 2025 linked to a 1 GW wind-solar farm that could reduce coal consumption by about 210,000 tonnes per year – czytamy w raporcie. That amount is just 2.2 percent of the facility’s annual coal use.
In such cases, the integration of renewables is a relatively small cost for obtaining regulatory approval. GEM warns that this risks making renewable energy a complement to, rather than a replacement for, coal consumption, enabling further expansion of fossil fuel industries under the guise of a low-emission system.
Since 2022, China has pursued a strategy of building the new before removing the old. This approach has led to unprecedented investment in both renewable and fossil fuel infrastructure over the past four years. The ultimate test of China’s mega renewable bases, GEM concludes, will not be how many GW they add, but how much coal they actually replace.
Źródło: WNP.PL, Fot. Alex Tao Wang / Shutterstock
