Heatwaves of up to 42°C in China have led to increased demand for electricity, while hydropower output struggles to meet its share of demand.
Industrial production has been forced to stop or significantly curb output through a provincial order across 4 major provinces until the 20th of August so that residential power demands can be prioritized.
So far this lack of power has led to some increases in the costs of refining raw material such as lithium for batteries, but it also highlights a significant weakness within the Chinese energy mix.
Sichuan province produces around 80% of its electricity through hydropower. Or at least it usually did when many of its reservoirs haven’t dried up due to extreme weather conditions.
It’s clear to see why China built so much hydropower capacity within the region, Sichuan province is incredibly mountainous with many rivers releasing water from the Tibetan plateau, making it ideal for hydroelectric power.
Much of this electricity is then exported to the power hungry, population dense eastern centers of industry.
But as heatwaves and extreme weather events become more commonplace, so will higher electricity demand as active cooling becomes a necessity.
As we are being shown here, hydropower is uniquely unsuited to addressing increasing power concerns when the main influencing factor is a drought. Increasing demand for air conditioning alongside the evaporative threat to pumped storage reservoirs inevitably reduce operational effectiveness.
With the progression of climate change, extended droughts are predicted to become more commonplace, bringing with them uncertainty surrounding the efficacy of hydroelectric power storage and generation.
These uncertainties reveal what should be serious concerns when you look at the sheer scale of China’s reliance on hydroelectric power generation.
As of February 2022, China had 390GW of installed hydroelectric capacity, roughly 17% of its energy mix. And in 2020, China had 32GW of pumped hydro capacity, by far the most globally on both metrics.
Between March and July of this year much of Sichuan province experienced optimal conditions to build reserves. Extended periods of rainfall filled dams to the brim, even forcing some coal plants to shut off and give way to hydro power to lower the reservoir levels.
Yet here we are, only a month later and China is being forced to ration industrial electricity usage because it hasn’t rained for just 20 days.
If that seems like a long time, it might not in a couple decades from now, and that’s what should worry China.
China is showing the world that even with such massive pumped storage reserves, it would need significantly more to even scratch the surface of its ever-increasing energy demands.
Speaking of which, China has yet more in the pipeline, aiming to have a total of 62GW of pumped storage installed by 2025.
But it begs the question, why? When an extended drought threatens nearly 20% of your electricity generation capacity, why would you then continue to increase your dependence on it?
We are yet again seeing that hydropower and pumped storage is a poor defence against extreme weather conditions, despite being shown this repeatedly by Brazil in the past, with its decade long drought.
China has at least shown some signs of learning from Brazil’s mistakes, at the end of 2021 it launched the largest floating solar array at the time on a reservoir in Shandong province, rated at 320MW.
Assuming China installs more floating solar on its reservoirs now that it has proven to itself that it’s doable, it should at least protect what water it gets from evaporating when it needs it most. Dam reservoirs suffers almost 10% less water loss in the areas covered by floating solar, and the solar still produces electricity even when the reservoir is dry and it sits on the bottom.
While this still doesn’t solve the precipitation issue, that’s the risk you take when committing to hydroelectric power. No rain, no storage, no power. Nobody can say China wasn’t warned.