State Grid Corporation of China

Built World

Surpassed 600 billion yuan annual investment amid worsening curtailment crisis

In August 2023, wind turbines in China's far west nearly crashed the entire national grid. Low-frequency oscillations from poorly integrated wind farms in Xinjiang threatened a blackout across the world's most populous country. Twenty-eight months later, the crisis has intensified: curtailment rates nearly doubled in early 2025—solar waste jumped from 3% to 5.7%, wind from 3.9% to 6.6%—as record installations overwhelmed transmission capacity. Tibet now throws away one-third of its renewable electricity. China's answer: a 750 million volt-ampere AI-controlled smart transformer and over $83 billion in annual grid investment, racing to stabilize a system buckling under its own clean energy success.

Updated Dec 27, 2025