China to clear bottleneck in clean-energy grid by 2020, official says
Less electricity being wasted because of lack of transmission capacity in the system, energy agency says
China expects to solve the problem of renewable energy going to waste by 2020, an official at the National Energy Administration (NEA) said on Monday, as the government takes aim at one of the biggest challenges to promoting clean energy.
Liang Zhipeng, deputy director of the NEA’s new energy and renewable energy department, also said the agency expected the wind sector to wean itself off government subsidies by 2022.
Wind power is often wasted because there is not enough transmission capacity to handle all the electricity generated, resulting in curtailments. But in the first three-quarters of this year, curtailment dropped 7 percentage points, he said.
Getting stranded power in the west to urban users in the world’s top energy consumer has been a major headache for the government as Beijing seeks to boost the use of more renewable energy and cut dependence on coal, the nation’s favourite fuel. The world’s second-largest economy is one of the world’s top producers of renewable energy.