Facilitating the Transition Toward Smart Electrification with Renewables in China

With the new carbon emission reduction targets in place, China has been contemplating how to transition the world’s largest power grid toward a net-zero future. Renewable electricity has rapidly scaled up in China, reaching a remarkable milestone at 1,000 GW installed power generation capacity, with more set to be added in the decades to come. What implications would accelerated deployment of renewables have for the power system?

IRENA and State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) have teamed up for years to explore such questions. With three years of joint efforts, IRENA and SGCC have now produced the report Smart Electrification with Renewables: Driving the transformation of energy services. The report presents recent trends in relevant technologies and innovations, sets out possible long-term pathways for electrification with renewables, and identifies priority actions to enable those pathways. It also provides a host of potential solutions, insights and perspectives to facilitate the transition towards a future power system with a vast expansion of renewables, a smarter and much more flexible electricity grid, and huge increases in the numbers of vehicles and other products and processes that run on electricity.

This event introduced the contents of the Smart Electrification report – the fruit of cooperation between IRENA and SGCC – and a new collaborative initiative between the two organisations to address key strategic issues that future power system operations in China and beyond would likely encounter with rising shares of variable renewable energy sources in the power mix.

The agenda is available here.