China's cross-regional electricity trade rose 14.87% YOY to 315.2 terawatt hours (TWh) in the first half (H1) of 2012, according to statistics released by the State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC) on July 16.
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and regions in northeast and northwest China were the main sellers of electricity in the six-month period, while central, eastern and southern regions were the biggest buyers, according to the SERC.
Those northern regions are rich in coal, hydropower and wind power resources but are relatively underdeveloped. Therefore they regularly produce excess electricity which they sell to more industrialized areas.
The cross-regional trade in electricity is a good way to help digest the clean energy generated in northeast and northwest China and Inner Mongolia, said by Yang Sili, a power industry analyst at an investment bank in Shanghai. In times of weakening power demand, many Chinese power firms prioritize hydropower and wind power but suspend some thermal production to reduce costs, explained Yang.
Inner Mongolia sold its surplus wind power to Beijing and Tianjin municipalities and Hebei and Shandong provinces in H1, while western Sichuan Province offloaded its surplus hydropower to central provinces over the same period, said Yang.
Meanwhile, national power consumption in H1 rose 5.5% from a year earlier to 2,374 TWh as the economy slowed, according to the National Bureau of Statistics