BEIJING (Xinhua) From increasing photovoltaic cell efficiency to installing high-capacity wind turbines, emerging sci-tech innovations are accelerating China’s renewable energy development and making the country’s future greener and smarter.
INNOVATION-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
The 2025 energy Nature Index shows that from 2019 to 2024, China’s clean energy output was significantly higher than that of other countries. A total of 63 of the 100 institutions ranked highest in terms of energy research output are based in China, including all of the top 20.
Technological innovation has led to continuous progress in renewable energy technology. The conversion efficiency of photovoltaic cells with different technology routes, for example, has been continuously improved, making solar power generation more stable and efficient, and increasing the proportion of low-cost renewable energy in China’s power market.
The maximum conversion efficiency of Jinko Solar’s high-efficiency N-type TOPCon modules is now 25.58 percent — a global record. The company is expected to complete the upgrading of over 40 percent of its production capacity this year, and to achieve a 40-to-50-gigawatt high-power TOPCon production capacity by the end of 2025.
In the field of wind power, China has continuously broken records for unit capacity. In late April this year, a domestically produced 16.2-megawatt wind turbine installed on the coast of east China’s Jiangsu Province was the world’s largest wind turbine in terms of unit capacity — but that record was beaten in less than six months.
In late August 2025, a 26-megawatt offshore wind turbine developed by a Chinese firm was installed on the coast of east China’s Shandong Province, breaking global records for unit capacity and rotor diameter.
With an average annual wind speed of 10 meters per second, a single unit can generate 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which can meet the annual electricity consumption demand of 55,000 households, save more than 30,000 tonnes of standard coal and reduce CO2 emissions by more than 80,000 tonnes.
China’s installed wind and photovoltaic power generation capacity has been breaking records continuously. By the end of March 2025, the country’s installed wind and photovoltaic power generation capacity had reached 1.48 billion kilowatts, surpassing that of thermal power for the first time in history. By the end of June, the figure had increased to 1.67 billion kilowatts — 13.6 percent higher than thermal power.
However, solar and wind power generation still face the challenge of unstable power supply due to weather conditions. China is rapidly promoting progress in energy storage technology as a key measure to tap into the potential of renewable energy.
Energy storage systems can smooth the unstable output of photovoltaic or wind power to increase the proportion of renewable energy in the grid, and they can collaborate with conventional power sources to provide auxiliary services such as peak and frequency regulation for power systems and improve their flexibility. Energy storage includes conventional pumped storage and new energy storage technologies.
In September this year, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the New Energy Storage Technology Development Roadmap (2025-2035).
The document notes that for three consecutive years, China has ranked first globally in terms of newly installed new energy storage capacity. Currently, the sector is dominated by lithium-ion battery energy storage, and is seeing the diversified development of other technology routes such as flow-battery energy storage and compressed-air energy storage.
According to the roadmap, China’s installed new energy storage capacity is expected to exceed 180 million kilowatts by 2027, 240 million kilowatts by 2030, and 300 million kilowatts by 2035. The country’s rapidly developing energy storage industry will improve the utilization efficiency and power generation of renewable energy.
EMERGING INDUSTRIES
The latest data from the National Energy Administration shows that in 2024, investment in China’s key renewable energy projects accounted for over 80 percent of all power investment in the country. And investment in key projects such as new energy storage, charging and swapping infrastructure, and hydrogen energy projects approached 200 billion yuan, becoming a new energy investment growth point. The supply of green power is helping the country embrace a greener and smarter future.
Technological progress in renewable energy, including the development of improved chemical batteries and photovoltaic panels with increased generation efficiency, has promoted the growth of emerging industries represented by the “new three” in export products: electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and photovoltaic cells. It has become a source for the development of new quality productive forces.
China’s rapidly increasing renewable energy supply has also helped meet the electricity demand of the advanced manufacturing and digital industries represented by artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. According to data from the National Energy Administration, the increase in wind and photovoltaic power generation exceeded the increase in electricity consumption across the whole country in the first half of this year.
The rapid development of the AI and big data industries has been boosted by green power. In recent years, China has introduced a slew of policies to guide the coordinated development of computing and electricity.
In July 2024, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the National Energy Administration and the National Data Administration issued an action plan to accelerate the construction of a new power system between 2024 and 2027. It proposed the integration of power sources, loads and energy storage resources; the coordinated planning and layout of computing and power infrastructure; and an increase in the proportion of green power consumed by data centers.
Zhang Linshan, a researcher at the NDRC’s Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research, said that the flexible load of computing centers can help the power grid absorb the volatile changes of renewable energy. Thanks to the national computing network, the coordinated construction of green energy bases and computing hubs in China’s western regions has seen fruitful results.
Through the direct supply of green power and the integration of power sources, grids, loads and storage facilities, the proportion of green power consumed by data center clusters has increased, and the wind power curtailment rate and cross-regional green power transmission loss have been reduced.
Many parts of China — particularly western regions such as Guizhou Province, which is known for its data centers — have attracted computing industry players with abundant local renewable energy resources.
The scale of the green computing industry in Qinghai Province increased from 370 petaflops in early 2024 to 15,000 petaflops in June this year — about a 40-fold increase. The scale of the computing industries in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have also increased significantly, driving the growth of emerging industries such as information transmission.
In east China’s Shanghai, the Lingang underwater data center is under construction, promoting the computing industry in another innovative way. The project plans to use offshore wind power resources to provide a green, stable power supply for the center, and to reduce the center’s energy consumption through a seawater-cooling process. The data center is designed to achieve a power usage effectiveness (PUE) below 1.15 and a green power supply rate of over 90 percent.
Su Yang, general manager of Shanghai Hicloud Technology, which is building the Lingang underwater data center, said that in terms of cooling energy efficiency, the natural submarine cooling system can curb the center’s heat-dissipation energy consumption by up to 10 percent, and that the center’s overall energy consumption will be 30 percent to 40 percent lower than that of land-based data centers.
