{"slug": "china-wants-its-green-power-wired-straight-into-the-data-centre", "title": "China wants its green power wired straight into the data centre", "summary": "China is pushing its data center industry to connect directly to renewable energy sources, bypassing the coal-heavy grid. The country's first large-scale green-power project for a data center cluster, a 500-megawatt solar farm in Zhongwei, began operation in May, with dedicated power lines supplying computing facilities. The initiative supports China's 'east data, west computing' strategy and its goal to have renewables provide 80% of AI data center power by 2030.", "body_md": "In the desert outside Zhongwei, in the northwestern region of Ningxia, four dedicated power lines now run from a field of solar panels to a cluster of computers.\n\nThey do not pass through the public grid. That detail, dull as it sounds, is the whole point.\n\nChina is encouraging its sprawling [data centre industry](https://thenextweb.com/news/china-295-billion-ai-data-centre-plan) to plug directly into wind and solar generation, rather than draw power off a grid still heavily fed by coal. The push is part policy, part demonstration.\n\nBeijing’s 2026 government work report named tighter integration between computing infrastructure and electricity supply as a priority, and a national green-data-centre plan now requires new projects in the country’s designated computing hubs to source most of their power from clean sources.\n\nThe Zhongwei plant is the project everyone points to. China Datang Corp commissioned a 500-megawatt solar farm there, describing it as the country’s first large-scale green-power project built to supply a data centre cluster directly.\n\nIt entered formal operation in early May, after green-power direct supply began in February, according to Chinese state media.\n\nWhat makes it unusual is the delivery. The site uses what Datang calls a dual-track structure: four dedicated 110-kilovolt lines carry electricity straight to the computing facilities, with additional demand covered through bilateral market trades.\n\nSolar output is prioritised during the day, wind is expected to cover the evenings, and storage smooths the gaps.\n\nThe solar plant alone should generate around 970 gigawatt-hours a year, roughly half the cloud base’s projected demand.\n\nThe numbers grow once the wind component arrives. The 500MW solar array is the first slice of a 2-gigawatt first phase that pairs it with a 1.5GW wind farm and storage, at a planned cost of about 8.7 billion yuan, or some $1.27bn.\n\nThe wind build is still under construction, scheduled for full grid connection in September.\n\nOnce phase one is complete, annual generation is expected to reach 4.3 terawatt-hours, more than the cloud base’s forecast consumption of 2.29 terawatt-hours. A second phase would push the total to 4.6GW.\n\nThe logic sits inside China’s *“east data, west computing”* strategy, which steers energy-hungry processing toward western regions where wind and solar are plentiful and land is cheap. Demand is the pressure behind all of it.\n\nAI has driven an explosion in computing capacity, and with it electricity use, at exactly the moment Beijing is trying to hit peak carbon emissions by 2030.\n\nThe ambition is steep. Authorities want renewables to supply roughly four-fifths of the AI data-centre sector’s power by 2030, up from around a tenth in 2023.\n\nThe gap between a single working project in the desert and that national target is the part the policy has not yet closed.\n\nCurtailment, grid bottlenecks, and the intermittency of wind and solar remain real, and China’s green-power goals for AI have already [run into the grid](https://thenextweb.com/news/china-green-power-ai-data-centres-hurdles) before.\n\nFor now, Zhongwei is the test case. If desert wind and sun can be matched to digital load without leaning on the conventional grid, the model travels. If they cannot, it stays a handsome demonstration in Ningxia.\n\nThe wind turbines are due in September, that is when the figures stop being projections.\n\n## Get the TNW newsletter\n\nGet the most important tech news in your inbox each week.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-wants-its-green-power-wired-straight-into-the-data-centre", "canonical_source": "https://thenextweb.com/news/china-green-power-data-centres", "published_at": "2026-06-25 12:00:48+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-25 12:17:35.795590+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-policy", "ai-research"], "entities": ["China Datang Corp", "Zhongwei", "Ningxia", "Beijing"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-wants-its-green-power-wired-straight-into-the-data-centre", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-wants-its-green-power-wired-straight-into-the-data-centre.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-wants-its-green-power-wired-straight-into-the-data-centre.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-wants-its-green-power-wired-straight-into-the-data-centre.jsonld"}}