Priority Dispatch on Paper: Legal-Institutional Gridlock and Renewable Energy Curtailment in Inner Mongolia, 2015–2021

Inner Mongolia curtailed 18 per cent of its potential wind output in 2015 and 21 per cent in 2016, with constraints persisting into the 2020s. This article asks why curtailment persisted despite the Renewable Energy Law’s priority-dispatch and full-purchase obligations. Combining legal institutionalism with multi-level governance in an in-depth case study of 2015–2021, it identifies three interacting layers of institutional gridlock: coal legacies carried by generation quotas, fiscal dependence and coal-oriented transmission infrastructure; fragmented authority within the region’s dual-grid architecture; and a legal architecture in which statutory priority lacks an enforceable remedy and is displaced by priority-generation-rights and equal-dispatch arrangements. The article argues that generation-rights trading, introduced in 2015–2016 to promote renewable substitution, enabled thermal incumbents to monetize dispatch entitlements at wind producers’ expense. Comparison with Germany and the United States, together with assessment of the 2024 Guaranteed Purchase Supervision Measures, the 2024 Energy Law and the 2025 market-pricing reform, grounds three reform pathways: an enforceable priority-dispatch entitlement with automatic compensation, partial recentralization of coal-project approval, and binding coordination between the two grids. The analysis presents curtailment as a consequence of interacting institutional arrangements and identifies the legal and organizational changes needed to strengthen renewable priority.