This report presents a 2030 resource adequacy outlook for Shandong Province using a prefecture-level power system operations model. It evaluates different development pathways for coal, wind, solar, and energy storage, and assesses system resilience under stress tests involving interprovincial HVDC outages and extreme weather.
Rapid growth in wind and solar power is fundamentally reshaping resource adequacy risks in China’s power system. Resource adequacy risks are expanding from conventional peak-capacity shortages to ramping constraints during periods of rapid net-load growth and geographic mismatches between supply and demand. In the transition to a new power system, relying primarily on baseload capacity expansion is increasingly inadequate to meet the complex needs of power supply reliability. These changes call for a more granular and transparent approach to resource adequacy planning and assessment. Using Shandong Province as a case study, this report examines resource adequacy under a low-carbon transition, with a focus on large-scale renewable energy deployment and system resilience to extreme disruptions.
This report assesses Shandong’s resource adequacy in 2030 using an hourly unit commitment and economic dispatch (UCED) model. The model represents all 16 prefecture-level cities as individual nodes and simulates four consecutive weeks of summer system operations.
The analysis constructs 16 scenarios based on alternative pathways for four key resources: coal power, energy storage, wind, and solar PV. The coal transition pathway reflects a managed reduction in available coal-fired capacity through a smaller project pipeline, retirement of selected existing units, and reduced power output from extraction-condensing units serving industrial heat demand. The model does not optimize new capacity additions. Given predefined generation and network configurations, it identifies dynamic supply shortfalls using hourly non-served energy (NSE), or unmet electricity demand. In addition, under the comprehensive low-carbon transition scenario, the stress tests examine sustained low-wind and low-solar conditions and outages of major interprovincial high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) import links.
Report
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Executive Summary (PDF)
Recommended citation:
Davidson, M., Wei, M., Dupuy, M., Gao, C., & Jiang, Y. (2026). Shandong’s 2030 resource adequacy outlook: A prefecture-level analysis under the low-carbon transition. Electricity Market Tracker. Available at: https://emtracker.org/research/shandongs-2030-resource-adequacy-outlook-a-prefecture-level-analysis-under-the-low-carbon-transition/.