SINGAPORE/BEIJING, Sept 20 (Askume) – A surge in small-scale renewable energy generation is helping China meet rising electricity demand and reduce the role of coal in the country’s power mix, but power generation is left out in the broader, closely watched monthly data report from Beijing.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) issues a monthly bulletin on major economic indicators, and its data only examines industrial companies with annual main business revenue of at least 20 million yuan ($2.84 million).
For the renewable energy sector, this has resulted in the National Bureau of Statistics losing a large share of output from small-scale energy sources that power homes, offices and industry, making information about the Chinese economy more difficult.
These figures also hide the progress made towards reducing the share of coal-generated electricity in the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
“Well-structured monthly reporting of energy and electricity data is critical for China to track progress toward its carbon targets,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
China’s electricity generation is expected to grow by 6.4% in the first half of 2024, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. However, London-based energy think tank Ember calculated power generation from small-scale renewables using data from China’s National Energy Administration, which saw a 7.3% increase.
Since the late 1980s, the National Statistical Office has provided monthly updates and kept records in a unified reporting model. But China’s energy regulator, the National Energy Administration, provided no public timeline before revealing the data. It also stopped reporting usage information in June, making it difficult to track renewable energy generation over time.
The National Energy Administration did not respond to a request for comment, and the National Bureau of Statistics declined to comment, saying only that it surveyed companies of “some size.”
“When analysts and investors look at aggregate output data and see that it is greatly underestimated, especially the growth data, they have a false picture of the state of the economy,” Milihuerta said.
This gap is largely due to the growth of distributed solar power generation in China over the past three years, with smaller installations growing at roughly twice the rate of large utility-scale solar farms – which have been the main driver of China’s renewable energy installation capacity growth.
Distributed solar power, including rooftop panels, are smaller installations that provide electricity near where it is used.
Ember data shows that in the first half of 2024, wind power and solar power will account for 20.3% of China’s power generation, significantly higher than the National Bureau of Statistics’ 15% figure.
The National Statistical Office estimates that fossil fuels account for 67.8% of the country’s electricity generation, while AMBER’s estimate, based on data from the National Energy Administration, is 62.3%.
“China’s National Bureau of Statistics’ wind power and especially solar power generation data only reflect part of electricity generation, while its installed capacity data shows the full picture,” said Zhuang Dong, a China energy policy analyst at Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance.
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