China has developed smart power grid technology that cuts blackout recovery time to a 10th of a second, according to state media, which said the innovation was expected to play a bigger role in ensuring the safe and stable distribution of electricity worldwide.
The grid protection technology enables power grid faults to be isolated and restored within a hundred-millisecond window, compared with the hours otherwise required, according to a Science and Technology Daily report on Tuesday.
It also solves the problem of identifying micro-current faults at the hundred-milliampere level.
The development, which is in use in industries such as power, steel and rail transport, has been deployed across the country and exported to 12 nations. It was developed by the China Electric Power Research Institute, an affiliate of the State Grid Corporation of China.
“As a key technological support for the safe operation of modern power systems, this achievement not only ensures the reliability of power supply in the capital and the country, but also promotes the intelligent manufacturing upgrade of power equipment,” the report said.
Traditional power grids are undergoing changes with the addition of more distributed power sources, such as wind farms and solar plants.
These sources have an unstable energy output, and the distributed nature of the grid makes it more difficult to find and fix failures.
This prompted Chinese power grid operators to search for ways to recover rapidly from blackouts.
In 2022, China’s state-owned power grid company launched an artificial intelligence system for electricity distribution to resume power supply in three seconds. The recovery once took between six and 10 hours to fix.
For the latest advance in further cutting blackout duration, researchers from Tianjin University, Shandong University, State Grid Beijing Electric Power, the Nanjing-based electrical equipment firm NR Electric and Beijing Sifang Automation, which provides power system protection, worked together for a decade.
The team’s breakthroughs included creating a system to balance power from unpredictable sources, such as wind and solar; developing high-speed protection and restoration technology to instantly divert electricity through complex grids; and mastering detection of complex non-linear high-resistance grounding faults.
China, home to the world’s largest power grid, generates more than twice the power of the United States.
In 2025, the nation’s total electricity consumption was projected to exceed 10 trillion kilowatt-hours, making it the world’s biggest consumer, surpassing the combined 2024 consumption of the European Union, Russia, India and Japan, state news agency Xinhua reported last month.
Wind and solar power were set to account for around 22 per cent of the country’s total electricity consumption last year, Xinhua reported.
The news agency said that this year China would continue to expand wind and solar power, build hydropower projects, safely develop nuclear power and strengthen the clean use of fossil fuels. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
