While domestic grid planning’s regional nature offers different policy examples, countries around the world offer even more diverse examples that could inform domestic transmission policy, experts said during a webinar hosted by Americans for a Clean Energy Grid.

China has a large, well-connected national grid now, but its system is regional enough that this was not some inevitable destiny. It was the result of deliberate policy choices, said Michael Davidson, associate professor at the University of California San Diego.

“When I first started studying Chinese energy systems in 2008, there were no UHV [ultra-high-voltage] lines,” Davidson said. “There were a handful of HVDC lines. But now they have over 40 UHV lines. And if you include those HVDC lines, it’s actually closer to 70.”

Building out a backbone transmission system to help grow renewable energy’s share of the grid while ensuring reliability has become a key strategic priority of the central government, he added.

“China actually has some fairly deep provincial fragmentation and a lot of autonomies granted to local governments,” Davidson said. “But during the restructuring of the power sector, which split up the grid company and the separate generation companies, you started to see some synthesis around this. And then, basically through the actions of very connected political leaders and top-down decisions, it was decided in early 2000s to go big on a national backbone.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s latest five-year plan focused on building a “new energy system,” which would be powered by renewable energy, and that means grid planners are focused on projects that help integrate renewable power, he said.

Any transmission lines 500 kV and above are planned federally, with provincial governments having to site them, but lower-voltage lines are entirely within the remit of the provinces. The planning also includes new sources of renewables, which are built on one side of new lines to bring them to serve load in a city, which means the Chinese avoid the chicken-and-egg problem often seen with generation and transmission domestically, Davidson said.

“All land is owned by the state,” Davidson said. “Even if the land has been allocated for different uses, the state always has significant power, and you don’t face the same legal bottlenecks that you would have in the United States around building new lines.”

The companies building out the grid are state-owned, with massive balance sheets, easy access to financing and much lower returns than U.S. utilities.

While the return to demand growth is a recent trend for U.S. grid planners, China has seen rapid growth for decades, and new demand from manufacturing and other more traditional loads greatly exceeds that from data centers, which Davidson pegged at 10% of incremental load.

“There’s none of the ‘bring your own generation’ kind of situation in China, because there’s just so much ample capacity on the transmission side and on the generation side,” Davidson said. “And now what they’re trying to deal with is how they power these new loads with renewables.”

One area where the U.S. industry is ahead of China is how sophisticated its planning is, with Davidson specifically pointing to CAISO’s 20-year transmission plan as more advanced than Chinese efforts. (See CAISO Sees $30B Need for Transmission Development.)

Germany’s grid is split between four transmission system operators, which is rare for Europe where one entity usually runs a national grid, said Katerina Simou, energy policy adviser at 50Hertz. Her company is partially owned by Elia Group, which runs the grid in eastern Germany and includes its two largest cities, Berlin and Hamburg.

“And in that capacity, we are responsible for optimizing, expanding and planning our extra-high-voltage grids,” Simou said. “We’re also responsible for operating them in a safe and efficient manner, for ensuring security of supply.”

Every two years there is a nationally coordinated planning process between Elia and the other three system operators to match supply and demand over the next 10 to 15 years, she added. Generally, the generation is concentrated in the north and east of Germany and has to flow south and west.

“We have a lot of renewables, particularly offshore here, and a lot of Germany’s heavy industry is located in the south and southwest of the country,” Simou said.

A federal ministry reviews the plan, and Germany’s parliament votes on the largest, most important lines, which acquire a specific legal status where they are considered necessary and urgent, she said.