China’s top province for solar panels plans to accelerate the development of other renewables as well as battery storage, as it seeks to keep promoting clean energy while dealing with a glut of midday electricity, reports Bloomberg. Shandong, the northern coastal province with a $1.4 trillion economy, delivered enough solar generation last year to power Austria. But much of that electricity comes in the middle of the day, overwhelming the grid, raising curtailment rates, and causing frequent bouts of negative prices in the region’s power market.
If Shandong were a country, it would be the world’s sixth biggest for solar. As such, its renewables strategy is likely to inform other regions as they adopt cleaner but more intermittent power. The direct threat to solar is that any shift away from the technology threatens to further injure panel makers already suffering billions of dollars in losses.
“The rapid expansion of solar has led to an increase in consumption pressure,” Sun Aijun, director of the Shandong Development and Reform Commission, said in a group interview in Jinan late last week. “To solve it, we want to take advantage of our coastal location and accelerate the development of nuclear power, and offshore and onshore wind, to gradually change the structure of new energy that’s currently dominated by solar.”