China’s renewable power generation capacity—including hydro—reached over 38 percent of total newly installed capacity at the end of last year. The country is clearly the world leader in wind and solar power additions as it seeks to move away from coal as quickly as possible. But it has yet to solve its problem with what the industry calls curtailment, or the waste of renewable power due to grid limitations. China is solving this problem with supergrids. China has 22 ultrahigh-voltage power transmission projects in operation: an emerging supergrid that could, among other things, reduce the waste of renewable energy by linking the regions that produce it to the regions with the highest rates of electricity consumption, writes Peter Fairley for Spectrum , the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ magazine. The ultrahigh-voltage grid is unique in that it combines DC with AC lines, with the DC lines transporting the […]