China’s Electricity Market Trades 5.18 Trillion kWh in First Eight Months, Up 19.2%

The headline growth is real, but the composition matters more: medium- and long-term contracts still dominate, meaning the spot market remains a thin slice of a system built on bilateral scheduling rather than continuous price discovery. The faster rise in intra-provincial trading than in inter-provincial flows suggests marketization is deepening locally faster than it is knitting regions together, which is the harder problem for absorbing variable renewables. Green power trading's modest growth relative to overall volumes is the number worth watching next.