Reaching carbon neutrality in China: Temporal and subnational limitations of renewable energy scale-up

Acute temporal impacts and subnational limitations can hinder a country’s decarbonization pathway, despite national planning efforts. China, as the world’s largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter, has announced an ambitious climate policy goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, which will require an unprecedented scale-up of low-carbon energy technologies. China’s variable renewable energy (VRE) deployment is historically imbalanced with large geographic concentrations driven by resource endowment and institutional heterogeneities. If continued, this pattern can run into deployment limits and exacerbate challenges associated with socio-economic benefits distribution, threatening the ability to timely integrate VRE. We develop a capacity expansion model with grid operational detail and high spatial resolution to examine decadal pathways to carbon neutrality by 2060 considering localized and temporal impacts. Over these four decades, we find that all regions will increase deployment rates of renewable energy, first driven by the use of high-quality resources, and later by coal retirement and electricity demand growth. The share of provinces with high deployment pressure, where deployment requirements exceed historical rates, increases from around 45% to 100% by the final decade. If carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not available, maximum annual average deployment rates will increase by 33% and occur a decade earlier. A more stringent 1.5 °C emission target leads to more acute temporal and spatial deployment pressures in the first decade, with VRE concentrated in regions with high-quality resources and demand centers and a doubling of new transmission capacity in the first decade. Effective national and subnational policy support is necessary to coordinate VRE deployment and facilitate transitions in impacted regions. • Built a power system optimization framework with high spatial–temporal resolutions. • Reaching carbon goals requires increasing renewable deployment rates. • Technology uncertainty exacerbates the temporal limitation issue. • Cost-efficient pathways may face acute deployment pressures at subnational levels. • Identified region-specific policy priorities over time to coordinate the transition.