China’s power system needs to be climate proofed

In 2024, the northern summer did not just break records. It shattered the illusions held by climate skeptics. As thermometers in Beijing hovered near 40C and hospitals across the hemisphere overflowed with heatstroke patients, one message became unmistakable: 

The era of climate consequences has arrived. 

This new reality is rewriting the rules of energy security and no nation is exempt. In China, the United States and India, unrelenting heatwaves forced grids to the brink as electricity consumption rose to historic highs, largely to power air-conditioners. 

The scorching months saw coal and gas plants roaring back to life. Those countries are prime examples. They are home to the world’s three largest electricity markets, together accounting for more than half of global demand. 

It was a stark reminder that fossil fuels remain the fallback when extreme weather strikes.

From Texas to Tamil Nadu, power grids have been buckling under unprecedented demand for cooling, exposing a paradox of the energy transition. 

Extreme conditions

Even as renewable capacity expands, old fossil infrastructure continues to serve as a crutch during extreme stress. 

China epitomises this challenge as the home to the world’s biggest clean-power system. 

Despite its inexorable march toward renewable energy, the country’s rapidly expanding clean-power system remains insufficiently resilient to withstand extreme conditions. In 2024, when temperatures spiked, the old coal-centric system had to step in to bridge the gap.

By 2050, global cooling demand could more than double, posing an even greater challenge for China and the world’s energy transition. For Beijing, the task ahead is not only to scale up renewable-energy supply, but to fundamentally re-engineer the entire power system.

This would make it more flexible, intelligent and climate-proof.

Last year, heatwaves and a longer, hotter summer were key drivers of China’s year-on-year electricity demand growth. Our recent report at Ember quantifies the monthly impact of these temperature changes.

The findings are stark. Between April and September, electricity demand increased by 7% compared to the same period in 2023. An estimated 31% of the rise stemmed from higher cooling needs. 

This amounts to an estimated 102 terawatt-hours of additional electricity use for cooling compared to the same period in 2023 – enough to power all of Algeria for a year.

The temperature effect was especially strong in August and September, reaching 26.5C in August and 23.1C in September – the highest in a decade.

Factory shutdowns

Cooling demand also doubled the year-on-year electricity growth. Without it, the rise would have been just 4%, instead of 9%. 

And in September it would have increased by 4.4%, rather than 9%. 

China was not the only country to experience this. In the US, electricity demand would have fallen by 1.3% in June, but increased cooling resulted in a 9.4% rise instead.

This pattern is no outlier. In 2022, a historic 70-day heatwave coincided with China’s worst drought in 60 years. In Sichuan, a hydropower-dependent province, reservoirs dried up, slashing electricity output by 50%. 

Cooling demand spiked substantially. Even coal plants running at maximum operation could not prevent factory shutdowns. 

Again in 2023, Henan and Shandong provinces endured temperatures above 40C on multiple occasions, pushing July’s electricity demand to a record high and forcing grid operators to resort to rolling blackouts.

China’s power system is in the midst of a major transition, guided by the principle of “building before breaking.” This cautious approach prioritises scaling up clean-energy supply before phasing out fossil fuels. 

The logic is clear. A country is more likely to retreat from coal when it is confident that clean electricity can reliably meet demand at scale and with affordable costs.

The progress has been staggering. Wind and solar capacity increased by 34% in the past year alone. As of last June, combined wind and solar capacity has exceeded that of coal, and is on track to exceed total thermal-generation capacity this year.

As China’s renewable-energy system expanded at an impressive rate, coal has been in relative decline. 

Coal generation

While it once dominated, accounting for more than 70% of electricity generation in the mid-2000s, it has been growing more slowly than demand and losing market share to the new power system. Its share fell to 54.8% last year.

Yet, the heatwaves in 2024 revealed how far China still has to go. The new clean-power system, while growing quickly, is not yet mature enough to ensure uninterrupted supply, especially as climate change drives more frequent and intense extreme weather. 

When demand peaked, the old system – anchored by coal – had to step in to bridge the gap. 

In August, coal generation was 4.4% higher year-on-year, more than double the 2024 annual average rise. A month later, coal generation jumped even more sharply, increasing by 10%.

Across August and September, coal generation increased by a combined 68 terawatt-hours, accounting for 59% of last year’s annual increase.

To break the fossil-fueled feedback loop, scaling up clean electricity capacity and continuing to improve air-conditioning efficiency are crucial.

They are, however, only part of the solution. 

A grid increasingly dominated by weather-dependent renewables must also incorporate greater flexibility in order to withstand climate extremes.

One solution is to accelerate the deployment of energy storage, such as grid-scale batteries and pumped hydro, to capture midday solar surpluses and deploy them during evening air-conditioning peaks. 

Innovative long-duration energy-storage solutions – such as thermal storage and green hydrogen – are also critical to addressing seasonal variations in renewable-energy generation. 

Critical services

Moreover, climate-proofing the power grids is now urgent. 

Heatwaves, droughts, and storms must be treated as routine, not exceptions. Cities need heat-resistant transmission lines, flood-proof substations, and decentralized solar-storage micro-grids to sustain critical services during extreme conditions.

Collectively, these steps would transform China’s power system from one that merely survives climate shocks to one that thrives despite them.

Kostantsa Rangelova is a global electricity analyst at Ember, an independent global energy think tank in the United Kingdom. Yang Muyi is senior electricity policy analyst at Ember.

This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence. Read the original here.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of China Factor.