China’s National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration have jointly issued a heavyweight Notice on the Orderly Promotion of Multi User Green Power Direct Connection.
For the wind and solar PV power industries, the core highlight of this new policy is the official opening up of a new “one to many operation model” for green power direct connection at the national level.
What is green power direct connection?
Simply put, green power direct connection refers to clean electricity generated by wind and solar power, which does not need to be transferred through the public power grid and is directly transmitted to large electricity users such as factories, industrial parks, and computing centers through dedicated lines.
In 2025, the first version of the green power direct connection policy only supported “one-on-one power supply mode”, which means that a single wind or photovoltaic project can only connect to one electricity user. In May 2026 the new green power direct connection policy has completed iterative upgrades, officially moving from one-on-one to one to many.
The core reason for the upgrade to the new policy
The core reason for the rapid iteration and upgrading of this policy can be attributed to one word blockage. The current installed capacity of new energy in China has exceeded 1.9 billion kilowatts and is expected to increase to 3.6 billion kilowatts by 2035. The scale of new energy installed capacity continues to soar, and the problem of electricity consumption has become increasingly prominent. The capacity of public power grids in many places to accept new energy is approaching saturation, and the speed of power grid supporting construction cannot keep up with the pace of new energy installed capacity expansion.
The new policy sets hard rules
Fan Pengfei, Dean of the Energy Policy and Market Research Institute of the Electric Power Planning and Design Institute, pointed out that industrial parks account for more than 66% of the country’s total energy consumption, and promoting industrial users to consume new energy on site is the core key to expanding the development space of new energy.
The new policy sets two hard red lines for multi-user green power direct connection, regulating industry development.
- Clarify the standard for ‘self use’ ratio.
The proportion of annual self generated electricity consumption in the project must not be less than 60%, and the proportion of self generated green electricity consumption in the total electricity consumption of the enterprise must not be less than 30%.
By 2030, it will be necessary to further increase it to more than 35%, strictly follow the principle of load based power supply, and eliminate the blind development mode of building power sources first and finding electricity loads later. - Strictly control the scale of grid connection.
Grid connected direct connection projects must not exceed 20% of the total power generation in terms of annual grid connected electricity. During periods of tight power consumption, reverse power transmission to the public grid is prohibited.
These two red lines define project positioning, and make it clear that the core purpose of green power direct connection is to consume new energy nearby, rather than relying on the public power grid to sell electricity.
According to Wang Shaomin, a researcher at the Energy Research Institute of Huaneng Group, this will effectively prevent projects from using the public power grid as a backup resource.
Source: Seetao, May 23, 2026. https://www.seetaoe.com/details/266137.html
