The 14th Five-Year Plan for modern energy system development released

On March 22, 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the National Energy Administration (NEA) jointly issued the 14th Five-Year Plan for Modern Energy System Development, which clarified the key tasks for the development of China’s energy sector from 2021 to 2025. It contains three key points:

  1. To strengthen the security and stability of energy supply, and puts forward quantitative requirements for annual energy production capacity including oil and gas;
  2. To promote the green and low-carbon transition of energy production and consumption, and the proportion of non-fossil energy in total primary energy consumption should reach 20% in 2025 and above 25% in 2030;
  3. To improve the modernization level of the industrial chain, the investment in energy research and development will increase by more than 7% annually during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, aiming to accelerate the digitalization and intelligent upgrading of the industry to greatly improve the efficiency of the energy system.

In terms of marketization, the Plan clarifies that a power trading and dispatch mechanism which conducive to non-fossil power consumption should be formed to promote its participation in power markets; continue to carry out green power trading to highlight the environmental premium of new energy; guide the energy storage and demand-side resources to participate in power markets to improve system flexibility; explore non-fossil power sources to carry out inter-provincial point-to-point transactions to expand regional power system flexibility; clarify the price and market rules of the distributed power market to deal with the current development bottlenecks.

The main development targets in the energy sector in 2025 and their completion in 2020