China’s New Five-Year Plan Expands Massive Clean Energy Bases Into Hydropower-Rich Southwest
Published · 3 min read
China has released a draft 15th Five-Year Plan that significantly expands its network of giant clean energy bases, adding a new focus on southwestern provinces alongside existing projects in the northwestern deserts.
The plan combines solar, wind, and hydropower into large integrated complexes designed to generate electricity at a scale few countries have attempted.
Northwest Foundations, Southwest Push
China’s northwestern region, covering parts of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Ningxia, has long been the center of the country’s large-scale renewable push. These areas receive between 3,100 and 3,300 hours of sunshine annually and experience strong winds for nearly 200 days a year.
The draft plan keeps these desert-based projects as a core pillar. In Inner Mongolia alone, six large wind and solar bases have been approved, with a combined planned capacity of 72 million kilowatts.
Once complete, those bases are expected to transmit roughly 216 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year across multiple regions, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 100 million tonnes annually.
A New Emphasis on the Southwest
What makes the draft 15th Five-Year Plan notably different is its new push into southwestern China, where hydropower infrastructure is already well established.
The plan calls for combining existing hydroelectric capacity with new solar and wind installations, creating hybrid energy complexes that can balance each other during shifting weather conditions.
Sichuan province crossed a major milestone on December 13, 2025, when the completion of the Yinjiang Hydropower Station pushed the province past 100 million kilowatts of total hydropower capacity, roughly one-quarter of China’s national total.
The province already sends about one-third of its electricity to other regions, making it a natural anchor for the new southwestern strategy.
Giant Projects Already Under Construction
On the northwestern side, construction on the northern expansion of the Kubuqi Desert Base in Inner Mongolia officially began on September 29, 2025, with a total investment of 98.8 billion yuan (about $14 billion).
The phase includes 8 million kilowatts of solar and 4 million kilowatts of wind capacity. When completed by end of 2027, the base is expected to deliver roughly 36 billion kilowatt-hours annually to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei power grid.
In the southwest, the Batang Hydropower Station on the Jinsha River in Sichuan added its first generating unit in May 2025. Once fully commissioned, the station will supply more than 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year, enough for 1.75 million households.
Transmission Lines Carry Power Across the Country
Both the northwestern and southwestern bases rely on ultra-high-voltage (UHV) transmission lines to move electricity from remote areas to population centers on the coast.
The draft plan targets 420 gigawatts of cross-country power transmission capacity by 2030, up from 340 gigawatts in 2025. State Grid, China’s largest grid operator, plans to add 15 more UHV lines by 2030, on top of the 45 already built.
One of the most ambitious projects is the Tibet-Guangdong UHV line, a roughly 2,681-kilometer link from the Tibetan Plateau to the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Budgeted at around $7.5 billion, it is scheduled for completion in 2029 and will carry more than 43 billion kilowatt-hours per year.
Storage Fills the Gaps
The plan also calls for building 100 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage and continuing rapid deployment of battery systems.
By the end of 2025, China’s installed new energy storage capacity reached 144.7 gigawatts, an 85 percent increase year-on-year.
The southwestern hydropower stations are well suited to complement solar and wind, storing water and releasing it when sun and wind output drops. This natural balancing role is a key reason the new plan targets that region specifically.
What Comes Next
The plan is still in draft form, but the direction is clear. China is moving to knit together its northwestern desert capacity with a new generation of southwestern hybrid complexes, all linked by expanding transmission infrastructure.
Annual clean energy investment reached 7.2 trillion yuan (about $1 trillion) in 2025, roughly four times what was spent on fossil fuel extraction and coal power in the same period.
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