This comes against the backdrop of total installed power-generation capacity rising by 14.1 per cent, year on year, in the first five months while investment in power grids increased by 21.6 per cent.

“Renewable energy such as wind and photovoltaic generation is marked by big fluctuations and volatility and needs the state to coordinate consumption, storage and transmission,” Cai Yuanji, a researcher with Tsinghua University’s Sichuan Energy Internet Research Institute, said at a forum in April.

“There is an aggravating issue in the renewable-energy sector despite an investment boom: it’s difficult to send excess electricity exceeding local demand out to other regions, and what we call ‘power abandonment’ will occur,” Cai said.

Power reform is widely believed on the cards, as it was mentioned at a symposium hosted by President Xi Jinping last month.

The Communist Party will hold its third plenum from July 15-18, and the gathering is expected to chart the country’s growth path and address economic bottlenecks.

Power capacity and infrastructure are vital components in Beijing’s green transition and shift towards the digital economy and hi-tech. It is also viewed as a key element in the rivalry for supremacy in energy-intensive sectors such as computing facilities and artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, energy authorities gazetted a document that lowered the utilisation requirement to 90 per cent for regions with abundant wind and solar radiance reserves, while ordering barriers to be removed for interprovincial trading and transmission.

China saw widespread renewable electricity abandonment between 2016 and 2020, resulting in the NEA rolling out a 95 per cent requirement.

In the meantime, the world’s second-largest economy is relying on renewable energy to help reach goals of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and becoming carbon neutral by 2060. As China continues to swap out fossil fuels for green energy, the integration and consumption of wind and solar energy have put a heavier strain on the energy system.

Anticipation was further raised after the president heard recommendations on electricity-market reforms from State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) chairman Liu Mingsheng at a May meeting with business leaders – a gathering seen by analysts as a preview of key reform agenda items at the third plenum.

Li Peng, deputy director of the SPIC’s planning department, told China Energy News earlier this month that price reforms and the granting of access for wind and solar power companies to plug into the state grid are among the potential means to better utilise renewable energy.

“Renewable electricity must be fed onto the grid at market prices to keep utilisation at a reasonable level,” Li said.

The NEA’s region-specific data between January and April also revealed that renewable-energy utilisation across Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Tibet frequently dropped below 95 per cent. In Tibet, photovoltaic-generation utilisation hovered around 71.8 per cent in the first four months – a very low level compared with NEA’s requirement of 95 per cent stipulated in 2020.

While extreme weather and frequent downpours have dragged down utilisation, analysts warn that a consumption and transmission bottleneck is choking renewable energy development when even more capacity is in the works.