About Yanzhao Electric Power Laboratory

Yanzhao Electric Power Laboratory

The Yanzhao Electric Power Laboratory is a provincial laboratory of Hebei Province, in northern China, for electric power and new-energy technology, based in Baoding. It belongs to Hebei's Yanzhao Laboratory series and is built on two local foundations: Baoding's national-level cluster for electric-power and new-energy high-end equipment manufacturing, branded "China Electric Valley", and the Baoding campus of North China Electric Power University, China's specialist electric-power university. The laboratory is organised around the "source–grid–load–storage" chain of the modern power system, and serves as a platform for research, industrial incubation and strategic consulting. Its director is Liu Jizhen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Baoding: China Electric Valley

Baoding, in central Hebei, south-west of Beijing, built its industrial identity around electrical equipment — transformers, switchgear, and, as the energy transition advanced, wind, solar and other new-energy equipment. The "China Electric Valley" brand, developed by the Baoding municipal government with North China Electric Power University since the 2000s, named that ambition: a national base for new-energy and power-equipment industry. University and city records document the strategy's elements — a university science park opened in the Baoding High-Tech Zone in 2012 as the only national university science park in China featuring energy and electric power, acting as a base for transforming research achievements, incubating high-technology enterprises and providing public technical services for the Electric Valley. The Yanzhao Electric Power Laboratory is the provincial-laboratory capstone of that two-decade local strategy: Baoding News reporting describes it as built on the city's national-level electric-power and new-energy high-end equipment manufacturing cluster.

Director Liu Jizhen

Liu Jizhen is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the long-serving former president of North China Electric Power University, whose leadership of the university was closely identified with the Electric Valley strategy: university records of the 2009 symposium on building the valley show him, as president, proposing a new-energy industry alliance of government, enterprises, universities, research and finance to develop it. His scientific field is the control and operation of power systems and power plants, and in recent national debates he has written on building China's new-type power system — improving the friendliness of new-energy generation to the system, creating system-friendly new-energy power stations, and coordinating source, grid, load and storage resources, themes set out in the national Action Program for Accelerating the Construction of a New Type of Power System (2024–2027). The laboratory he directs is organised around exactly that framework. In his published discussion of the national action programme, Liu addressed its practical details: creating system-friendly new-energy power stations; integrating source and storage resources and optimising the configuration and operation of storage so that distribution-level storage delivers its full regulating capacity; and coordinating the siting of data centres with power-grid resources, planning computing-and-power synergy projects in advance so that the growth of digital infrastructure supports, rather than strains, the green grid. Each of those themes is a working topic for a source–grid–load–storage laboratory.

The source–grid–load–storage chain

The laboratory's organising concept is the "source–grid–load–storage" chain: generation sources, the grid that carries power, the loads that consume it, and the storage that balances them. In a power system dominated by variable wind and solar generation, the four must be planned and operated as one system — sources that can be controlled and forecast, grids that can flex, loads that can respond, and storage that can shift energy across time. Baoding News, reporting after the laboratory's unveiling, describes it as organised around that chain. The framing gives the laboratory a whole-system brief unusual among equipment-focused institutes: it can address a transformer or a turbine, but its subject is the system they serve.

Talent gathered

Baoding News reporting after the laboratory's unveiling records the talent it had gathered: 2 academicians and 22 national-level senior talents. In the Yanzhao series' pattern, a provincial laboratory's first asset is concentrated senior people — the steel laboratory reports an academician-led team of about 105, and this laboratory's two academicians and twenty-two national-level talents place it at the senior end of provincial platforms. That concentration reflects its double base: a specialist national university's Baoding campus and a manufacturing cluster whose leading companies employ senior power-equipment engineers of their own.

Record: projects, key technologies, Geneva golds

The same Baoding News reporting records the laboratory's early output: 193 technical projects undertaken, 8 key core technologies overcome, and 3 gold awards at the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions. The project count — 193 — is the largest such figure reported for any Yanzhao laboratory, consistent with an equipment-and-systems platform whose work divides naturally into many industry-facing projects. The Geneva golds are a distinctive marker: the Geneva exhibition is one of the world's principal invention fairs, and gold awards there indicate inventions judged internationally, not only within China's own award system. Together the figures describe a laboratory already operating at industrial tempo by the time its unveiling was reported.

Platform functions: research, incubation, consulting

Baoding reporting describes the laboratory as a platform for research, industrial incubation and strategic consulting. The three functions correspond to its three constituencies. Research serves the science of the source–grid–load–storage system. Industrial incubation serves Baoding's equipment cluster — the function the Electric Valley's university science park pioneered locally, turning research achievements into companies and products. Strategic consulting serves government and grid decision-makers, the role its director has played nationally on new-power-system policy. A laboratory that consults on the system it researches, and incubates the equipment that system needs, is designed as provincial infrastructure for the whole energy-transition chain, not as a single-discipline institute.

The university base

North China Electric Power University is, as its own English materials state, the only university under the Ministry of Education specialising in electric power among China's Project 211 universities of its generation, with campuses in Beijing and Baoding. The Baoding campus gives the laboratory its academic home and its pipeline of power engineers; the university's science park in Baoding, a national university science park for energy and electric power, supplies the incubation machinery. Liu Jizhen's presidency joined the university's strategy to the city's Electric Valley for over a decade; the laboratory extends that partnership to provincial rank, under the Yanzhao series' sponsorship by the Hebei science authorities.

Hebei's energy context

Hebei surrounds Beijing and carries much of the capital region's energy burden and opportunity: heavy industry to decarbonise, coal capacity to transition, and, in its north, some of China's richest wind and solar resources, whose power reaches the capital region through its grids. A provincial electric-power laboratory in Hebei therefore addresses the province's central strategic problem — how a coal-and-steel province builds a new-type power system — from the province's own power-equipment city. The laboratory's source–grid–load–storage brief, its director's national role in new-power-system thinking, and its Baoding manufacturing base align provincial science with that problem directly.

Significance

The Yanzhao Electric Power Laboratory is significant as the point where three documented strategies meet: Hebei's Yanzhao provincial-laboratory system, Baoding's two-decade China Electric Valley industrial strategy, and China's national programme for a new-type power system built around source, grid, load and storage. Its reported profile — an academician director who authored both the university and the valley strategies it rests on, 2 academicians and 22 national-level senior talents gathered, 193 technical projects undertaken, 8 key core technologies overcome and 3 Geneva invention golds, with research, incubation and consulting as its stated functions — describes the most industry-embedded of the Yanzhao laboratories, and Baoding's claim to remain China's electric valley in the storage-and-renewables era.