Advancing solar and wind penetration in China through energy complementarity

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hu, Yuan; Jiang, Hou; Zhang, Chuan; Yuan, Jianlong; Zhang, Mengting; Yao, Ling; Chen, Qiang; Wu, Jichao; Zhang, Hualong; Ma, Subin; Li, Xiang; Zhang, Weiyu; Dong, Quanhua; Wen, Congcong; Yin, Gege; Zhang, Fan; Yu, Chaohui; Jin, Zhijun; Liu, Yu
• 署名单位: Peking University; Peking University; Chinese Academy of Sciences; Institute of Geographic Sciences & Natural Resources Research, CAS; Nanjing Institute of Geology & Paleontology, CAS; Peking University; Alibaba Group; Wuhan University; China Meteorological Administration; National Satellite Meteorological Center, China Meteorological Administration
• 刊物名称: NATURE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0028-0836; 1476-4687
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10570-z
• 发表日期: 2026-05-28
• 关键词: POWER; storage; plants

摘要

The intrinsic variability of solar and wind energy, compounded by their rapid expansion, has intensified power curtailment challenges(1,2). Although spatiotemporal complementarity between these resources is widely recognized as a pathway to enhance renewable integration and reduce balancing requirements(3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15-16), existing assessments are largely based on hypothetical deployments(17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23-24). Consequently, how solar-wind complementarity manifests under real-world infrastructure and shapes system-level integration outcomes remains unclear. Here we develop a unified national inventory to enable a data-driven assessment of solar-wind complementarity. The inventory covers 319,972 solar photovoltaic facilities and 91,609 wind turbines in 2022, identified from sub-metre satellite imagery using a deep-learning-based framework. Using this dataset, we show that solar-wind complementarity substantially reduces generation variability, with effectiveness increasing as the geographic scope of pairing expands. At the system level, nationwide inter-provincial coordination raises effective renewable penetration by 99.88 TWh in an 80% dispatchable-flexibility system, corresponding to 9.1% of total solar and wind generation, or approximately 120 h of national average load. These findings demonstrate that energy complementarity is a scalable, system-wide mechanism for advancing solar and wind penetration, offering broadly applicable insights into the role of inter-regional coordination in enhancing renewable integration in large power systems.