Powering a secure future

Grid resilience is emerging as the new backbone of modern energy systems, making its strengthening a priority

The global energy system is facing a complex set of risks. The severe disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has once again exposed the vulnerability of global energy supply chains. If the strait were closed entirely, around a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade could be severely disrupted. While this would be a global crisis, its effect would be felt particularly acutely in Asia. Many developing economies across the wider Asia-Pacific have already been severely impacted and remain particularly exposed.

Energy security has not disappeared. It has changed.

The April 2025 blackout on the Iberian Peninsula was one of the most serious incidents to hit Europe's power system in the past two decades. Investigations showed that multiple factors such as overvoltage and inter-area oscillations contributed to the grid's failure.

These incidents point to a common challenge. The effects of climate change are testing the world's energy system in new ways, while geopolitical fragmentation is creating new uncertainties. Strengthening grid resilience is therefore becoming an increasingly urgent priority.

At the same time, a new energy future is becoming clearer. While electrification is accelerating, artificial intelligence is increasing demand for clean power. The operational bottleneck in the global energy transition is no longer simply generation capacity. It is increasingly the network itself.

More than 80 million kilometers of transmission and distribution infrastructure will need to be built or modernized worldwide by 2040 — roughly equivalent to rebuilding the entire existing global grid. This represents one of the largest infrastructure challenges in human history. Building resilient grids is no longer simply an engineering task, but a strategic imperative that is becoming a new backbone of our modern energy civilization.

In recent years, China has sought to balance energy security with a green and low-carbon transition, while building a secure, modern and cleaner energy system. It has accumulated considerable practical experience in renewable energy development, grid infrastructure, power-system flexibility and emergency response to extreme weather.

First, China has continued to strengthen the grid's capacity to optimize the allocation of energy resources. It has accelerated the construction of cross-regional transmission corridors, expanded large-scale resource allocation and mutual support across regions, and enhanced the flexibility and resilience of grid operations.

With 45 ultra-high-voltage transmission corridors in operation, China's west-to-east power transmission capacity has reached 340 million kilowatts. Construction of transmission infrastructure supporting large-scale wind and solar bases in the arid or desert areas is also being accelerated, enabling abundant renewable resources in western and northern China to reach major load centers in central and eastern regions of the country.

Second, China is promoting better coordination between renewable energy development and the power grid. A growing share of renewable energy necessitates coordination among generation, grids, loads and storage, alongside the wider application of energy storage, intelligent dispatch and digital technologies to improve system flexibility and operational stability.

By the end of 2025, China had put into operation 136 million kW of new-type energy storage capacity. China's power grid has also become the world's largest platform for integrating new energy, supporting the connection and efficient utilization of more than 1.8 billion kW of new energy capacity nationwide.

Third, China continues to strengthen disaster prevention, risk reduction and emergency recovery capabilities. In response to severe weather, greater attention has been given to the resilience of critical infrastructure, emergency management systems and the capacity to restore electricity supplies quickly.

In typhoon-prone areas, such as Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, distribution automation has been expanded across urban networks. This helped restore power supplies across the affected area within three days of Super Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in 2023. In remote areas, projects featuring dual-source grid structures and energy-storage microgrids have also helped improve disaster resilience.

These practices not only support China's high-quality energy development, but also offer useful experience for the Asia-Pacific region as it confronts shared challenges.

This year, China will host APEC for the third time. Positioned at the forefront of the global energy transition, the Asia-Pacific region is seeing surging demand for clean energy, while also working to strengthen energy security, affordability and climate resilience. The State Grid Corporation of China, serving as the Chinese co-chair of the APEC Energy Resiliency Task Force, is advancing an initiative to enhance power system resilience, focusing on high-share renewable energy integration, extreme weather response and system recovery. Designed as a voluntary contribution by the host economy in the energy sector, this initiative delivers practical, forward-looking recommendations intended to serve as a public good for the wider energy sector.

The global energy system is not a machine that can simply be engineered and left to run. Some of its most underestimated risks are neither technological nor financial. They are about trust, skills and institutional capacity.

Responding to these risks requires leaders to see the whole system and continuously rebalance priorities as conditions change. For almost two decades, the World Energy Council's World Energy Trilemma reports have helped make visible the tensions among energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability. Looking further ahead, the council is exploring a broader framework for future-facing dialogue and intergenerational leadership, which we call the Energy Compass. It identifies resilience, zero waste and circularity as emerging "North Stars" and seeks to help us navigate beyond the short-term horizon toward new possibilities for energy abundance, human flourishing and planetary health.

As the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping put it, progress often involves "crossing the river by feeling for the stones". Civilization is now crossing a new world energy river, whose currents are becoming faster, deeper and less predictable.

The defining leadership challenge of our time is to find ways to cross that river together. If the global energy system fails, civilization falters. That is not fatalism, but realism. And it is also a call to action.

This article was originally published in the Chinese magazine Energy Review.

The author is the secretary general and the CEO of the World Energy Council.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.