On 14 October the National Energy Administration's Henan office published an account of a visit to State Grid Henan. The first problem it listed for a province where wind and solar are expanding quickly was falling new-energy utilisation, followed by dispatch, market design, grid construction and supply security. It also singled out the disputes generated by the rapid growth of household rooftop solar and said they had to be handled fairly and according to the rules.
Two days earlier, at the NEA's third energy-regulation work meeting of the year, deputy administrator Song Hongkun told the regional offices to improve the market mechanisms that promote the absorption of new energy while they prepare for winter supply. The NEA's monthly renewable construction dispatch meeting for September, reported on 8 October, went further. The meeting, addressed by chief engineer Liu Deshun, asked provincial energy departments and grid companies to attach great importance to renewable consumption, to identify the transmission sections that block wind and solar output, and to speed up grid reinforcement.
Statements like these are routine in Chinese energy administration, but the number behind them has moved quickly. The NEA's own half-year release puts wind utilisation at 90.9 per cent and solar at 91.4 per cent for January to June 2026. A year earlier the same release reported 93.2 per cent and 94.0 per cent. Our view is that the decline is now large enough to change how China builds renewables, and that the new planning targets accept a level of curtailment that will be paid for mainly by generators exposed to market prices.
The rates converted into energy
China reports curtailment as a utilisation rate: the share of energy that wind and solar plants could have generated which they actually delivered. That makes it possible to work backwards from reported generation to the energy that was lost.
The NEA's figures for the first half of 2026 give wind generation of 598.4 TWh and solar generation of 655.5 TWh. At the reported rates, that implies about 59.9 TWh of curtailed wind and 61.7 TWh of curtailed solar, roughly 122 TWh in total. The same calculation on the first half of 2025, using 588.0 TWh of wind at 93.2 per cent and 559.1 TWh of solar at 94.0 per cent, gives about 42.9 TWh and 35.7 TWh, or 78.6 TWh. Curtailment rose by about 43 TWh, or 55 per cent, in a year. Because the published rates are rounded to one decimal place, each of these estimates could move by up to about 0.4 TWh either way, which leaves the comparison intact.
Delivered wind and solar output grew by 106.8 TWh between the two half-years. The energy the fleet could have produced grew by about 150 TWh. Put differently, close to 29 per cent of the increase in available wind and solar energy was curtailed. The lost 122 TWh is equal to about 2.4 per cent of national electricity consumption over the half, using the NEA's statement that wind and solar supplied 24.6 per cent of consumption.
Wind looks worse than solar. Grid-connected wind capacity rose 18.5 per cent year on year to 679 GW at the end of June, while wind generation rose only 1.8 per cent. Some of that gap is weather, and the NEA's releases do not separate a poor wind year from grid constraints. The quarterly figures still point to the grid. Subtracting the first-quarter release from the half-year release, we estimate second-quarter wind utilisation at about 90.4 per cent, lower than the 91.4 per cent reported for the first quarter. Solar went the other way, from 90.6 per cent in the first quarter to about 92.0 per cent in the second, probably helped by longer days and the seasonal rise in load.
Where the losses are
The provincial picture comes from the power-sector planning and monitoring centre under the Electric Power Planning and Engineering Institute, which publishes utilisation by province. Its release for January to March 2026, issued on 8 May, put wind utilisation below 90 per cent in western Inner Mongolia, Henan, Xinjiang, Tibet and Hainan, with Tibet below 85 per cent. Solar utilisation was below 90 per cent across the five northwestern provinces and in Tibet, Hainan and Yunnan, and below 85 per cent in Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Tibet and Yunnan. The centre counts only curtailment caused by system constraints, which is why its national figures (91.9 per cent for wind and 91.2 per cent for solar) differ slightly from the NEA's.
Henan's place on the wind list is the reason the regulator's visit this week matters. It is a populous interior province with heavy load, a long way from the desert bases of the northwest. The regulator's own account points to the distribution network, where household solar has grown faster than feeders and local dispatch have been able to absorb.
The most recent provincial table we could find is still the March release. The national half-year figures arrived through a press conference in July, but monthly provincial data, which developers use to decide where to build, does not appear to have been published since May. That gap should close. Under the rules now in force, a province's utilisation rate decides how much new wind and solar it may connect, so the numbers carry direct commercial weight.
From a red line to three tiers
For most of the past decade the industry treated 95 per cent as the floor. The 2018 clean-energy consumption action plan set it as the target for 2020. A State Council energy-saving plan in 2024 allowed resource-rich areas to go as low as 90 per cent where that was economic.
The NDRC and NEA guidance on new-energy consumption and dispatch, issued on 29 October 2025 as Document 1360, turned that exception into a system. It told planners to set different utilisation targets for different regions in five-year plans. Provincial energy departments must set an annual target with a three-year outlook, and use it, together with renewable consumption obligations, to fix how much new grid-connected capacity, including distributed solar, they allow each year. Provinces whose utilisation falls sharply or misses target must reassess new connections. The guidance also excludes curtailment at near-site projects, such as direct green-power supply lines and smart microgrids, from the statistics.
The new power system plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan, dated 21 July and published on 3 August, filled in the numbers. Nationally, new-energy utilisation should stay at about 90 per cent. First-tier regions should in principle stay at or above 95 per cent, second-tier regions at or above 90 per cent, and third-tier regions at or above 85 per cent. The plan targets more than 2,800 GW of new energy absorbed by 2030, new-type storage rising from 136 GW in 2025 to 300 GW, and pumped hydro of about 160 GW.
The difference between the old and new norms is large. At the first-half 2026 output level, a combined 95 per cent utilisation rate would mean about 66 TWh of curtailment. A combined 90 per cent would mean about 139 TWh. The gap of roughly 73 TWh per half-year is the volume of renewable output that China is choosing not to build enough grid and storage to save.
We think the move to tiers is sound economics. Chasing near-zero curtailment in Gansu or Qinghai would mean building transmission and storage for a handful of midday hours. The weakness lies in how the targets are applied. Linking each province's annual connection quota to its own utilisation rate gives provincial governments a reason to slow new connections instead of building the grid, and excluding near-site projects from the statistics will make the headline rate look better than the physical system is. A province that meets its tier by connecting less wind and solar has complied with the rule without adding the grid and storage the plan is meant to deliver.
Who carries the cost
Since the 2025 market pricing reform known as Document 136, new wind and solar projects sell into provincial markets, with a price settlement mechanism to support revenue. The September dispatch meeting asked provinces to improve that mechanism and to guide the auctions for projects entering the 2027 scheme. In a market, curtailed energy is unsold energy, and the investors bidding into those auctions now carry the risk directly.
Provincial rules are moving in the same direction. Shandong's revised grid-connection and ancillary-service rules took effect on 1 October and revise the forecast-deviation and schedule assessments for wind, solar, distributed solar connected at 10 kV and above, and virtual power plants, with transition periods before full charges apply. On 30 September the NEA opened a 30-day consultation on a revised national regulation for grid-connected operation. The NEA's market data show spot trading of 562.7 TWh in January to August, about 10.9 per cent of the 5,180 TWh traded through the country's trading centres, so roughly one traded kilowatt-hour in nine is now priced in a spot market.
The NEA's figures for January to August show wind and solar output of 1,710 TWh, 23.8 per cent of consumption, against electricity demand growth of 4.3 per cent and total generating capacity growth of 11.1 per cent. Capacity is still growing more than twice as fast as demand. The next quarterly release will show whether third-quarter utilisation recovered with summer load or kept falling, and whether provincial tables return with it.