The southern regional power grid and grids in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Ningxia, Gansu, Fujian, and Shaanxi have collectively set new peak load records over 20 times as summer power demand surges.
New energy sources are playing a more prominent role. The Qiyuan offshore wind farm in Hainan commissioned its second batch of generating units with a capacity of 132 MW, capable of producing 408 GWh annually. The Jinchuan hydropower station on the Dadu River in Sichuan reached full capacity, with a total installed capacity of 860 MW and an average annual generation of about 3.5 TWh.
Energy storage projects have also advanced. Jiangsu saw grid-side battery storage put into large-scale operation and completed the country's first integrated power generation–hydrogen production–storage project, which combines energy development with coastal ecological restoration. In Shandong, phase one of a centralized storage station in Linyi started trial grid-connected operation, pushing the city's total independent storage capacity past 1 GW.
Wang Yongli, deputy director of the Energy Internet Research Center at North China Electric Power University, said the policy focus this summer should shift from "ensuring total volume" to "ensuring peak shaving, ensuring localized supply, and maintaining safety margins." He noted that while extreme heat can reduce photovoltaic efficiency or wind output, new energy still underpins electricity consumption growth and reduces fossil fuel use from an energy supply perspective. However, during peak power demand, the firm capacity of renewables is constrained, requiring coordination with coal, hydro, gas, and storage.
In the short term, he urged maximizing the peaking capability of support power sources and improving cross-provincial support and load warnings for critical areas. In the medium term, new storage, virtual power plants, and demand response should be integrated into the supply security framework. Long-term measures include refining capacity compensation, ancillary services, time-of-use pricing, and demand-side management to address the temporal mismatch from large-scale renewable integration.
According to Wang, the key to improving the reliability of new energy is moving from "generating more" to "predictable, dispatchable, tradable, and assessable" output. That requires better forecasting on the supply side, enhanced interregional support on the grid side, a sustainable model for storage, genuine dispatchable resources on the demand side, and incentive-based market mechanisms.