Ever since the U.S.-Iran war choked the Strait of Hormuz, Asian importers have scrambled for new sources of oil and LNG to keep the lights on. Yet China’s energy companies are reckoning with an entirely different problem: They have too much power.
“China’s grid is a very strong and stable one,” Youyuan Huang, executive vice chairman of BTR New Material Group, the world’s top maker of battery anode materials, said at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8. “But we’ve installed too much green energy.”
China will account for 60% of all installed renewable capacity through 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. In July, solar overtook coal as China’s largest source of installed power capacity. Daniel Liu, vice president of solar module giant Jinko Solar, said renewables effectively covered all of China’s electricity demand growth last year.
Yet production in the country’s clean energy sector has grown so much that there’s more energy infrastructure than the market needs.
Panelists at the Forum had an unlikely answer to the problem of energy overcapacity: AI.
AI, for one, requires a large and steady supply of energy. “[Energy] guarantees the safety and stability of computing power,” notes Huang. “With the development of GPUs, the power of a single chip has risen dramatically…This means that if the power drops, [large amounts of] data that’s being computed could be lost.”
Jiangxing Intelligence, a physical AI firm, has developed an AI ‘brain’ that monitors environmental conditions around renewable energy infrastructure to ensure electricity is collected and stored prudently. The ‘brain’ also controls a suite of autonomous robots, which help with the inspection and maintenance of solar panels and wind turbines.
“The supply of wind and solar energy is highly uncontrollable…at night there’s no sunlight, but during the day sunlight floods in,” said Haitian Pang, the founder and CEO of Jiangxing Intelligence. “With an intelligent brain that deeply understands the region’s physical and meteorological conditions, you can forecast wind and solar conditions, and then know what options you need for energy storage.”
Pang argued that such infrastructure will also help reduce reliance on manual labor, especially in remote areas. “When wind and sand bury the solar panels, for example, we can dispatch drones that automatically clean them with water,” he explained. “This way, the entire energy system can run more stably and efficiently.”
Greening Asia’s energy supply
Other parts of Asia are struggling to adopt renewable energy at the same pace as China. The archipelagic nature of parts of Southeast Asia, for example, makes building and maintaining a contiguous electricity grid difficult.
“The Philippines has more than 7,000 islands, while Indonesia has more than 10,000, so it remains to be seen how renewable energy can come into play alongside fossil fuels there,” Liu noted.
Huang also lamented Southeast Asia’s lack of clean and stable power, even as Chinese factories relocate to the region. “We have many investments in Indonesia, where many large-scale data centers are being built,” he said. “Yet most of them are powered by traditional energy sources like coal.
Liu added that India had made substantial progress towards adopting renewable energy, even though the country’s demand for coal remains high.
Still, panelists were optimistic that Asia’s energy transition is well underway. “I think a clean energy transition—including a lower-cost energy transition—will certainly remain a continuous pursuit for everyone,” said Pang.
“The narrative of energy transition differs across countries: for some it’s security, and for others it’s the future,” concluded Liu. “But they’re all actively embracing renewables.”