On May 22, 2026, the National Development and Reform Commission announced at a press conference that the total investment scale of China's power grid during the 15th Five Year Plan period is expected to exceed 5 trillion yuan, with an average annual investment of 1 trillion yuan, far exceeding the average annual level of 553.6 billion yuan during the 14th Five Year Plan period. This is the first five-year plan after the central government included the new power grid in the top-level deployment of the six networks, marking the comprehensive acceleration of the transformation of power grid construction from ensuring supply to digitization.

The construction focuses on three major directions: firstly, the main power grid, which will put into operation about 15 ultra-high voltage direct current transmission channels and 6 DC back-to-back projects. The scale of West East power transmission will exceed 420 million kilowatts, and the cross regional and inter provincial transmission capacity will increase by more than 30% compared to the end of the 14th Five Year Plan period; The second is the distribution network, implementing urban distribution network upgrading and updating, county-level single channel transformation, and rural power grid power outage management projects to narrow the urban-rural power supply gap; The third is the smart microgrid, which builds a self balancing and self regulating terminal energy system according to local conditions. The fixed assets investment of the State Grid during the 15th Five Year Plan is expected to reach 4 trillion yuan, an increase of 40% over the previous cycle.

By 2030, the new power grid platform will be initially established, achieving an additional inter provincial mutual aid capacity of 40 million kilowatts, accepting 900 million kilowatts of distributed new energy, supporting over 40 million charging facilities, and promoting the proportion of new energy generation to about 30%. Taking the Gansu Zhejiang ultra-high voltage project as an example, with a total investment of over 35 billion yuan, it can drive upstream and downstream investment of over 80 billion yuan, provide over 24000 job opportunities, and have a significant economic driving effect.Editor/Cheng Liting