China Top Five Buyers Expect to Increase Six Times More on Green Energy Consumption This Year

Chinese companies are increasing to buy green energy with top five buyers aiming to consume six times more green energy in 2022 than previous year, according to a ranking list of top buyers and sellers by research provider BloombergNEF last week.

China’s green energy trading market is maturing, said BloombergNEF in the report released on September 15, as previously disparate policies across provinces starting converge. Domestic green energy supply and demand are flourishing, boosting a rapidly increasing market. Steel companies have become leading buyers of green electricity followed by tech enterprises.

Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent are among the leading green energy buyers, ranking the second and fifth respectively in the list for all Chinese companies.

The Hangzhou-based internet company Alibaba procured roughly 860 gigawatt-hours (GWh) worth of clean energy this year while Shenzhen-based Tencent bought 504 GWh.

The ranking summarizes the most active buyers and sellers among Chinese companies in the green energy market based on previously signed contracts this year and future plans. The top five buyers were TISCO (1100 GWh), Alibaba Group (860 GWh), BMW Brilliance (670 GWh), Ansteel Group (560 GWh) and Tencent (504 GWh).

In BloombergNEF’s 2021 ranking of Chinese clean energy buyers, Alibaba Cloud and Intime Retail Group, two arms of Alibaba, ranked first and fifth respectively, with a total purchase volume of 299 GWh. Data center operator ChinData, and two petrochemical giants Juhua Group and Sinopec Yanshan Petrochemical Company were also included in the list.

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Alibaba, as the largest buyer of clean energy in the Chinese tech field this year, released a carbon neutrality action report in December 2021, making it the first firm to do so in the domestic internet technology field. According to the report, between 2018 and 2020, Alibaba ranked first in the Chinese IT industry in terms of renewable electricity procurement, transaction and usage. Alibaba has also pledged to neutralize direct and indirect emissions associated with the purchase of electricity by 2030. To do so, Alibaba will continue to increase the proportion of its renewable electricity supply.

In July, Alibaba and State Power Investment Corporation Limited (SPIC), one of the largest clean energy providers in the world, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly promote “new energy plus” and “digitalization plus” around eight green energy projects. In addition to buying renewable energy, Alibaba also proposes to achieve carbon neutrality through targeted emission reductions, carbon removal, and carbon offset.