Power ⚡︎ Moves

In China, the longest ultrahigh-voltage power line stretches more than 2,000 miles from the far northwest to the populous southeast — the equivalent of transmitting electricity from Idaho to New York City.

The power line starts in a remote desert in northwest China, where vast arrays of solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity on a monumental scale. It snakes southeast, following an ancient river between mountain ranges before reaching Anhui Province near Shanghai, home to 61 million people and some of China’s most successful electric car and robot manufacturers.

That’s a single power line. China has 41 others. Each is capable of carrying more electricity than any utility transmission line in the United States. That’s partly because China is using technology that makes its lines far more efficient than almost anywhere else in the world. The feat is owed to China’s ambitious national energy policies and the fact that few residents along the path of these lines dare object — even though the lines emit static electricity that local people said they could feel when holding a metal fishing pole.

“As long as you don’t fish directly underneath the wires and keep the fishing line from getting tangled in the wires, it’s basically fine,” Shu Jie, an air-conditioning repairman, said matter-of-factly, showing off a six-inch fish he had just caught.

China’s aggressive embrace of clean energy technologies, at a faster pace than even its own government expected or planned, has left it with an unquenchable thirst for electricity. Half the country’s new cars are battery-powered, and the 30,000 miles of high-speed rail lines run on electricity. Wind and solar energy provided over a quarter of China’s power in April, a milestone that few other countries can brag about.