Evaluating China's Mandatory Energy Storage Integration Policies: Impacts, Challenges and the Shift Toward Market-Oriented Flexibility

The complementary relationship between renewable energy and energy storage presents significant opportunities for the “Renewable Energy + Storage” mode. To address the flexibility challenges arising from the rapid expansion of renewable energy capacity, China implemented mandatory energy storage integration policies, which remained in effect until early 2025. This paper reviews and analyzes these policies, providing a comprehensive assessment of their impacts. While the policies have led to certain phased achievements, they also exhibit notable shortcomings, including rigid policy design, an uneven distribution of flexibility resource costs that disproportionately burdens renewable energy generators, and policy implementation delays.