Electric vehicles could become energy storage devices for the power system, and China needs to speed up infrastructure for charging and battery swap, a Chinese energy official said on Tuesday.

At a March 30 briefing on China's renewable energy development, Huang Xuenong, director of the Electric Power Department of the National Energy Administration, said China should vigorously improve the power system's flexibility.

China should accelerate the development of energy storage on a large scale, promote the digitalization of the power system and build efficient and intelligent dispatching and operation system, Huang said.

It may seem simple for the power system to supply electricity to electric vehicles, but if the development of technology and economic measures are utilized, electric vehicles can fully contribute to the power system capacity enhancement, he said.

In the trough of electricity usage, the power system can charge it; in the peak of electricity usage, the electric vehicle can be allowed to discharge the power system, he mentioned.

An electric car may become an energy storage device for the power system, and if thousands of electric cars are used in this way, then it will be very beneficial to the power system, he said.

Accelerating the construction of charging and battery swap infrastructure can promote both the development of new energy vehicles and the construction of a new electric power system, according to Huang.

Zhang Jianhua, director of the National Energy Administration, said China's renewable energy development and utilization scale is the world's largest.

By the end of 2020, China's total installed renewable energy power generation capacity reached 930 million kilowatts, accounting for 42.4 percent of the total installed capacity, up 14.6 percentage points from 2012.

In 2020, China's renewable energy power generation reached 2.2 trillion kilowatt-hours, accounting for 29.5% of the total electricity consumption, an increase of 9.5 percentage points compared with 2012.

By 2025, China's renewable energy will account for about two-thirds of the total incremental electricity consumption, and more than 50% of the total incremental primary energy consumption.

Renewable energy will change from being an incremental supplement to the original energy and electricity consumption to being the mainstay of incremental energy and electricity consumption, Zhang said.

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