China rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean energy in the first six months of 2026 as national power grids reached capacity limits. This practice, known as curtailment, involves the pre-emptive rejection of wind or solar power when the transmission network cannot accommodate the supply. A report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) noted that this volume of wasted energy represents a 49% increase compared to the same period in 2025.
The surge in curtailment occurs as global networks in countries such as Australia, Japan, and India also struggle to integrate a rapid buildout of renewable energy. According to analysts, the bottlenecks are caused by insufficient transmission infrastructure and supply contracts that prioritize the operation of newly built coal-fired power plants. In China, these factors have coincided with a new policy removing guaranteed fixed prices for renewables, resulting in a 66% decline in new solar installations during the first half of the year.
Discrepancies exist between independent reports and official government data regarding the scale of the issue. China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) stated that 8.6% of solar and 9.1% of wind output were curtailed in the first half of 2026. However, GEM and CREA used weather-adjusted data to estimate that 26.1% of total wind and solar output was actually rejected. The NEA, which stopped publishing monthly provincial curtailment data in March, did not respond to requests for comment on the higher estimates.
The scale of wasted energy is significant across several major economies. The 360 TWh rejected by China in six months is equivalent to the annual power consumption of Mexico. In Australia, curtailments rose 37% to 2.93 TWh, representing 7% of its renewable output. Japan saw a 34% jump in rejected power to 2.35 TWh, while India curtailed 8.13 TWh of solar power in the quarter ending in June—approximately 14% of its solar output for those three months. These figures represent billions of dollars in potential electricity generation that never reached the market or the consumer.
Individual households and small-business owners in these regions may see indirect impacts on their utility bills as grids balance the costs of maintaining coal plants alongside underutilized renewable assets. To mitigate these losses, developers are beginning to shift investments toward "solar-plus-storage" projects, which use batteries to hold energy for later use. Analysts from Ember suggest that an immediate scale-up of battery storage, similar to recent expansions in Chile and Bulgaria, is required to stall global curtailment. What happens next depends on infrastructure updates; Wood Mackenzie analysts expect curtailment pressure in China to persist through the end of the decade unless transmission capacity is significantly expanded.