Report: Renewables a major part in power generation by 2025

Renewable power generation capacity in China is expected to continue climbing in the next decade, with installed renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydro power, to account for more than half of the country's total generation capacity by 2025, a recent report said.

Renewable energy is expected to become a major part of capacity expansion for China's energy and power consumption by 2025 and account for more than 50 percent of the country's total installed power capacity, the China renewable energy development report 2020 released by the China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute said.

The increase in the renewable energy consumption will account for around half of the increments in primary energy consumption by the end of 2025 in the country, it said.

"The construction of new coal-fired power plants is likely to stop during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25) and it will be the beginning of a gradual reduction in coal plants' capacity," said Joseph Jacobelli, an energy analyst and senior adviser for Asia at Cenfura Ltd, a smart energy services company.

"Solar, onshore and offshore wind capacity additions will sharply accelerate and a great acceleration in energy storage－with a particular focus on cost reductions of existing solutions and more research and development on newer storage technologies－is also expected," he said.

Energy suppliers will also need to evaluate ways to hasten the adoption of digital technologies and solutions to optimize energy distribution and efficiency, he added.

According to a national renewable energy power development report recently released by the National Energy Administration, China's installed clean energy power generation capacity increased to 1.08 billion kilowatts by the end of 2020, accounting for nearly half of the country's total installed power generation capacity.

The country's actual consumption of electricity from renewable sources was more than 2.16 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2020, making up 28.8 percent of its total electricity consumption, up 1.3 percentage points year-on-year, it said.

The average national utilization rates of wind power and photovoltaic power generation in 2020 were 97 percent and 98 percent, respectively.

As China has been boosting green and low-carbon energy development, non-fossil energy accounted for 15.9 percent of China's primary energy consumption in 2020, while coal consumption dropped to 56.8 percent, with the intensity of carbon emissions being reduced by 48.4 percent from 2005 to 2020, said Zhang Jianhua, head of the administration.

China Electric Power Planning and Engineering Institute estimates coal consumption in China to be reduced to 51 percent by 2025, suggesting the government should continue to regulate the total energy consumption and intensity in the country while stepping up domestic oil and gas exploration and exploitation to ensure national energy security.

It forecasts the wind and solar power sectors to go through rapid development in the next five years and the country will stride into a new phase in high-quality development with stable economic growth and low-carbon transformation of the energy structure.

The 14th Five-Year Plan period is a key period to advance into the goal of peaking carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.

With the promotion of the new type of urbanization and improvement of people's living standards, energy demand in the next five years is expected to maintain rigid growth, while the energy consumption structure will highlight green and low-carbon, it said in the report.

In the future, reasonable energy demands would be fully satisfied, while the awareness of saving energy should be cultivated across the society to emphasize the idea that "saving energy is the first energy", said Du Zhongming, president of the institute.

During the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20), China's energy consumption experienced stable growth, which was controlled below 5 billion metric tons of standard coal, with an average annual growth rate of 2.8 percent.

More than 1 billion tons of outdated coal capacity was eliminated in during the period, while the output of crude oil remained stable at about 190 million tons, and 22.72 million kW of nuclear power went into operation, it said.