From Creating “Market” to Creating “Stability”: The Infrastructuralization of Solar Power Stations in Northwest China

The massive expansion of solar power in China was less a linear green transition than an evolving process of managing a politically conjured energy market. Triggered by the 2008 financial crisis, a rapid deployment soon collided with rigid material and institutional constraints of the national grid. This study analyzes this market creation and subsequent confrontation as a technopolitical process of “infrastructuralization”—a series of improvisational fixes designed to tame unruly energy to grid stability.

Based on policy analysis and fieldwork in Gansu and Ningxia provinces, I first trace how negotiations among panel manufacturers, state agencies, and local governments established the initial pricing and solar power dispatch mechanisms. Although the subsequently implemented Feed-in Tariff scheme helped absorb industrial overcapacity, it displaced the crisis into the grid infrastructure, engendering new challenges for power transmission and load balancing.

By investigating the everyday practices and micro-negotiations at power stations, I identify a dialectical friction between renewable power expansion and stable grid operation. Rather than a linear resolution, the taming of this unruly energy operates through intertwined socio-technical fixes: a spatial displacement that routes power surplus through ultra-high-voltage transmission lines, a disciplinary automation that enforces station compliance through centralized controls, and a marketized risk-shifting that burdens operators through trading reforms. Ultimately, these dynamics reveal a critical paradox in China’s green transition: renewable expansion recursively entrenches coal power infrastructure to secure operational and institutional stability.