Extreme weather could disrupt China’s boom in renewable energy

China’s huge electrical network is buzzing with more renewable energy in any other country, but this system also becomes more vulnerable to lack of power caused by unfavorable weather. The need to ensure that an amber power supply could push China’s government to use more coal -fired power plants.

China’s energy system quickly becomes cleaner, with almost every month setting new records for wind and solar energy production. The country’s total greenhouse gas emission – the world’s highest – is expected to peak soon and start falling. Wind, sun and hydropower currently make up about half of China’s power production capacity and is expected to rise to almost 90 percent by 2060, as the country has promised to reach “carbon neutrality”.

This growing dependence on renewable energy is also the country’s power system is increasingly vulnerable to the weather. Intermittent wind and sun can be supplemented by a stable hydropower, produced by huge hydropower dams concentrated in southern China. But what happens when a wind and sunset coincides with a drought?

Jianjian Shen at Dalian University of Technology in China and his colleagues modeled how power production on the increasingly sustained net would for these “extreme weather” years. They assessed how the country’s current and proposed future mix of wind, sun and hydroelectric power would behave under the least favorable weather conditions seen in the past.

They found that the future network would be significantly more sensitive to changes in the weather than today. At worst, the weather scenario could fall by up to 10 percent, leading to lack of power. By 2030, a year of the least favorable weather would result in an energy shortage of more than 400 terawatt hours, almost 4 percent of the total energy needs. “It’s not a number that anyone can just ignore,” says Li Shuo at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC.

In addition to a general lack of power, drought specifically limits the alement of hydropower to smooth out irregular wind and sun generation. This can also lead to power shorts. “It is important to equip the power network with some of stable power sources that are the affected by meteorological factors to avoid extensive extensive electricity deficiencies,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

One way to help would be to move excess electricity between provinces more effectively. Expansion of the transmission infrastructure to do this can eliminate the risk of lack of power on today’s grids and cut the risk in half of 2060, the researchers found. Adding tens of thousands of millions of kilowatt’s new power capacity, whether it is batteries or other methods, would also mitigate against hydroelectric drought, they found.

The amount of additional storage China will need to add to achieve carbon neutrality “will be an astronomical number,” says Li.

Although these changes will be difficult, it is possible to add that a lot of storage is possible given the huge volume of batteries that Alredy is produced in China, says Lauri Myllyvirta at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland. He says the country also builds 190 gigawatts pumped hydro-flow capacity, which can provide prolonged energy storage by pumping water over a dam using excess electricity and then repairs it when more power is needed.

So far, lack of power has mainly spurred China’s government to build more coal -fired power plants. In 2021 and 2022, for example, hydrogen waves and heat waves erected the power of power enough to cause serious blackouts, creating political press for a continuing expansion of coal. By 2023, hydropower generation led to record high emissions.

China’s President Xi Jinping has said that the coal power would peak this year, but between the political support for the power source makes this a difficult view. “If China suffers from another round of these episodes, more coal -fired power plants should not be the answer,” says Li. “It’s just hard to phase out coal; China loves coal.”