State Grid’s scale, grid investment and digital transformation illustrate China’s transition toward a more resilient, intelligent, and low-carbon energy system.
State Grid Corporation of China retained its position as the world’s third-largest company in the 2026 Fortune Global 500 rankings, highlighting the strategic importance of power infrastructure as China accelerates its transition toward a cleaner, more digitalised energy system.
Released on July 28, the Fortune 2026 ranking placed Amazon, Walmart, and State Grid in the top three, with 122 Chinese companies on the list. Meanwhile, CATL, the power battery and energy storage technology company, climbed 43 places to No. 260, reflecting the growing role of China’s clean-energy value chain.
The contrasting positions of State Grid and CATL reflect a broader industrial transition: China’s energy competitiveness is increasingly built on a combination of large-scale infrastructure, renewable integration, energy storage, and electrification technologies.
Scaling the backbone of the energy transition
Founded in 2002, State Grid is the world’s largest electric utility by revenue, with annual revenue of approximately USD 555 billion. The state-owned enterprise operates the main power grid across 26 provinces, covering around 88% of China’s territory and serving more than 1.1 billion people. It has also become a global leader in ultra-high-voltage (UHV) transmission, large-scale renewable integration and advanced grid operations.
State Grid’s global standing is supported by sustained investment in transmission capacity, renewable integration and grid modernisation. In H1 2026, the company completed more than CNY 310 billion in fixed-asset investment, up 12.6% year on year.
Major milestones included the commissioning of the Shaanbei–Anhui ±800kV ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) transmission project, which expands the delivery of renewable electricity from northwestern China’s resource-rich regions to major consumption centres in eastern China. Other projects, including the Panxi UHV AC project, the Zhejiang UHV AC network and the Mengxi–Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei ±800kV UHVDC project, are advancing as part of a broader effort to strengthen national transmission capacity.
These investments address one of the central challenges of renewable energy expansion: the geographic mismatch between generation and consumption. China’s most abundant wind and solar resources are concentrated in inland and northern regions, while major industrial demand centres are located along the eastern and southern coasts. UHV networks provide the backbone for transporting electricity efficiently across thousands of kilometres.
Building a flexible power system
As renewable penetration increases, State Grid is also investing in flexibility, resilience and system intelligence. The company continues to expand pumped-storage hydropower capacity, with 76 projects in operation or under construction and managed installed capacity exceeding 95 GW. Among these, 37 approved projects are being accelerated to provide balancing capacity for a power system increasingly dependent on variable renewable generation.
At the distribution level, State Grid has continued to strengthen network reliability, with more than 24,000 kilometres of new 110kV-and-above AC transmission lines launched and nearly 27,000 kilometres commissioned in H1 2026.
Renewable integration has expanded rapidly across its operating regions, where installed wind and solar capacity has reached 1,550 GW. Market mechanisms are also becoming increasingly important: electricity traded through market-based mechanisms reached 3,480 TWh in H1 2026, up 25.6% year on year. Interprovincial green power trading increased 23% to 64.1 TWh, while 74.11 million green certificates were traded, supporting China’s wider decarbonisation objectives.
From infrastructure scale to system intelligence
State Grid’s Fortune Global 500 ranking represents more than corporate scale; it reflects the strategic role of energy infrastructure in China’s economic transformation.
The next phase of global energy competition will depend not only on generation capacity but also on the ability to integrate renewable resources, manage increasingly distributed energy systems and provide reliable electricity for technology-intensive industries, including artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and advanced manufacturing.
China’s energy strategy is therefore moving beyond network expansion toward the development of an intelligent, flexible and market-oriented power system. State Grid’s investment scale, combined with regional innovation ecosystems such as Wuxi’s, demonstrates how traditional infrastructure enterprises are evolving into platforms that support the next generation of industrial growth.
Beyond China, State Grid has also expanded its international footprint through investments and operations in markets including Brazil, Australia, Portugal, the Philippines, Italy and Chile. Its overseas activities reflect a broader ambition to export expertise in grid management, renewable integration and energy infrastructure development as global economies pursue electrification and decarbonisation.