On November 29th, under the overall coordination of the National Energy Administration, the China Electricity Council (CEC) jointly released the “Blue Paper on the Development Plan for a Unified National Electricity Market” with multiple units. The Blue Paper clarified for the first time the “roadmap” and “timetable” for the development of a unified national electricity market, namely, preliminary establishment by 2025, full establishment by 2029, and improvement and upgrading by 2035.
According to the plan, by 2025, a unified national electricity market will be preliminarily established, with the top-level design of the electricity market basically improved and the basic trading rules and technical standards unified nationwide. By 2029, a unified national electricity market will be fully established, promoting the unification of basic market rules and regulations, fair and unified market supervision, and high-standard interconnection of market facilities.
Data shows that in 2023, the national electricity market transacted 5.67 trillion kWh of electricity, accounting for 61.4% of total electricity consumption. The market size has grown nearly fivefold since 2016. The amount of cross-provincial and cross-regional market-based electricity transactions nationwide approached 1.2 trillion kWh, indicating an increasingly significant role of the market in promoting the optimal allocation of electricity resources on a larger scale. A total of 743,000 operating entities have been registered in the national electricity market, up 23.9% year-on-year, further enhancing market activity.
The pace of renewable energy entering the market has also accelerated. In 2023, the amount of renewable energy traded in the market nationwide reached 684.5 billion kWh, accounting for 47.3% of total renewable energy generation. Some large power generation enterprises have more than 50% of their renewable energy participating in the market. The scale of green electricity and green certificate transactions continues to expand, with green electricity transactions reaching 151.93 billion kWh in the first half of 2024, up 233% year-on-year, and 160 million green certificates traded.
