China Curtailed About 122 TWh of Wind and Solar in the First Half, and Its New Targets Allow for More
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. 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.
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.
Delivered wind and solar output grew by 106.8 TWh between the two half-years. 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. Henan's place on the wind list is the reason the regulator's visit this week matters. The most recent provincial table we could find is still the March release. For most of the past decade the industry treated 95 per cent as the floor.
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. The new power system plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan, dated 21 July and published on 3 August, filled in the numbers. 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 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.