UHV power lines Transport electricity several thousand kilometers across China

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China is currently building a nationwide network of ultra-high voltage lines to harness even more solar and wind energy. The high-tech monster lines are often several thousand kilometers long and bring electricity from remote locations to densely populated industrial regions.

Henrik Bork, a longtime China correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau, is Managing Director at Asia Waypoint, a consulting agency specializing in China, based in Beijing. 

One of the latest examples of "Ultra-High-Voltage" or UHV transmission lines was put into operation at the end of October. The 1,000-kilovolt UHV AC line "Zhangbei-Shengli" will transport electricity from wind farms on the edge of the Gobi Desert to Beijing and Tianjin, and via further lines to Jiangsu province on the coast, more than 932 miles away.

The line will be able to transmit more than 70 billion TWh of electricity, enough power for 19 million households for an entire year. This will "increase the consumption of green energy at the endpoint of the power grid," reports the official news agency Xinhua.

Giant spiderweb under high voltage

The technology of UHV transmission was not invented in China, but it is now being perfected there on a scale never before seen worldwide—in terms of both the quality and quantity of the vast spiderweb under high voltage.

The UHV technology is based on the principle that the electrical currents must be lower for a certain amount of transmitted energy the higher the voltage can be maintained. In China, lines are classified as "UHV" if they can transmit direct currents (DC) of 800,000 volts  or more or alternating currents (AC) of 1,000,000 volts or more.

Central piece of China's energy strategy

The expansion of this network has become a central piece of China's energy strategy in recent years. The country has enormous resources of renewable energies, which are often harvested in the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, many thousands of miles away from the urban centers where the greatest demand is found.

The problem is universal, but it is particularly relevant in China due to the sheer size of the country. Storing green energy in batteries or other "storage media" is expensive. It is often better to transmit the electricity directly to urban centers without intermediate storage.

Committed to ambitious climate goals

Despite the massive initial investments required for UHV lines, in the long term, the low-cost solar and wind power can be better fed into the grid to cover the consumption of Chinese industry and keep electricity costs low for consumers. Additionally, China has committed to ambitious climate goals and sees this UHV grid expansion in the context of climate protection.

The development of a UHV network in China began just over a decade ago, primarily for the transmission of coal power from the northwest and north of the country to the megacities on the coast.

It was then recognized as cheaper and more efficient to send electricity from the mining regions in the north through power lines than to clog three-quarters of the country's total freight capacity with the shipment of coal and other fossil fuels. It was also intended to eliminate bottlenecks that repeatedly led to "blackouts."

Experience in constructing UHV lines

Very early on, in 2010, a 1,180-miles-long UHV line from the Xiangjiaba hydropower plant on the Jinsha River, one of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, to Shanghai was put into operation.

For this ultra-high voltage line, 3,939 power pylons were erected, carrying their massive cables over gorges, rivers, and the seemingly endless expanses of rice and vegetable fields to Shanghai, where today they cover around 40% of the metropolis's energy needs.

Recently, the central government in Beijing recognized that UHV lines are also central to the further expansion of renewable energies. Therefore, the expansion of the network is currently being significantly accelerated.

According to unofficial reports in Chinese specialist media, Beijing has already invested the equivalent of more than 200 billion euros in the expansion of the ultra-high voltage lines.

Billion-dollar investments in UHV projects

By April 2024, 38 UHV lines were already in operation, 18 of them AC and the rest DC lines. This means that China's State Grid, which operates most of them, has already achieved the goal set in the 14th Five-Year Plan by 2025 ahead of schedule. Additionally, 14 new lines are currently in planning or already under construction.

Official figures for the required investments are hard to come by, but China's State Grid has announced that it will invest about 380 billion yuan (around 50 billion euros) in UHV projects between 2021 and 2025, an increase of 35.7 percent compared to the previous five years.

According to unofficial reports in Chinese specialist media, Beijing has already invested the equivalent of more than 200 billion euros in the expansion of ultra-high voltage lines.

In China, UHV lines are also called "the Shinkansen for electricity," using the Japanese term for particularly fast and efficient high-speed trains. Similar to its own network of high-speed rail lines, Beijing is now rapidly and resolutely expanding the infrastructure of its UHV power lines.

1,200,000 megawatts of solar and wind power

When it comes to the installation of renewable energies, China is already a global leader. Recently, the milestone of 1,200,000 megawatts of solar and wind power has been reached, which, according to the country's self-imposed energy transition goals, was not due for another six years. (Our sister magazine MaschinenMarkt reported).

In 2024 alone, around 260,000 MW of solar and wind power installations will be newly deployed in China, more than anywhere else on Earth and about nine times as much as in Germany and four and a half times as much as in the USA during the same period. It has just been decided to triple the pace of this expansion of renewable energies over the next six years.

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The UHV network will enable China to further increase the share of solar and wind power in the overall energy mix from the current 15.6 percent. Already in the first half of 2024, the construction of new coal-fired power plants in China has slowed for the first time, despite the country's growing energy demand. China's carbon dioxide emissions have also recently decreased for the first time.

Most of the existing UHV lines in China currently transport a mix of coal power and green power. In 2022, the share of renewable energy transmitted through China's UHV network was 56.2 percent, as recently reported by the BBC. However, about half of that was still electricity from hydropower.

In the coming years, Beijing now aims to significantly increase the share of solar and wind power fed into the grid via long UHV lines. More and more solar and wind farms will be connected to UHV lines.

Use UHV for renewable energies

Recently, new UHV lines have also been established exclusively for the long-distance transport of renewable energies. More than 60 percent of all solar power and one-third of all wind power come from northwest China and the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. Now, it is to be distributed more effectively across the entire country, and the magic formula for this is UHV.

In 2023, construction began on the first "purely green" UHV line, which will transport wind and solar power from the northwestern province of Ningxia to the populous province of Hunan in the south of the country.

Affordable electricity prices for industry

Since renewable energies are the cheapest of all energy sources in the long term, Beijing also expects a further increase in the international competitiveness of its manufacturing industry. Already, electricity prices for Chinese companies are much lower than those for German companies at home.

E-cars, chemicals, and many other goods can be produced much more cost-effectively in China than in our country. Beijing's energy policy is significantly responsible for the success of new industries such as electromobility or the explosive growth of data centers for AI applications in China.

Subsidies for these new economic sectors, contrary to what is often assumed in the West, have only a relatively small share in these success stories. Cheap energy is China's biggest recipe for success—and this despite rapid economic growth and the energy needs of a billion people.

It is already certain that the relative "energy advantage" for Chinese industry will continue to grow in the coming years due to the simultaneous strong expansion of renewable energies and the UHV transmission network. In contrast, German industrial companies, which increasingly compete directly with Chinese companies, will be even more disadvantaged in their exports on the global market due to China's strategic energy and grid policy.