The amount of computing power generated by one kilowatt-hour of electricity has been included in the evaluation caliber! After the Suzhou Forum, the quality of electricity has begun to be converted into monetary value.
The quality evaluation of electric computing power has ushered in a new era of electricity accounting based on quality.
On October 27, the 2nd Quality Innovation (Suzhou) Forum opened at Cunju Hall of Soochow University. The China Water Resources and Electric Power Quality Management Association released *The Quality Era of Electric Computing Power*, which for the first time established the evaluation standard of "how much effective computing power can be generated by one kilowatt-hour of electricity".
After the forum, Ji Huimin, Secretary-General of the Association, and Hou Junda, Chief Economist, were interviewed by Foresee Energy. The forum explained how to build this system, while the interview dug into what is still missing. Starting from this forum, electricity accounts will be calculated by quality.
In Power Outage Statistics
There Is No Item for "Voltage Sag"
When the grid voltage drops for a short period from tens of milliseconds to two seconds and then recovers, the lights at home will not notice it, and the router will mostly not restart, but the server power supply in the data center will judge a power outage, trigger protection, and shut down the entire cabinet.
The industry calls this voltage sag, also known as "flicker outage". When the report was released, Hou Junda talked to the media about this magnitude: A voltage flicker that lasts only 100 milliseconds may lead to the complete failure of model training carried out by tens of thousands of graphics cards, requiring dozens of hours of re-operation.
There are only two states in the statistical caliber: power outage or no power outage. The power supply reliability rate is converted based on the average user power outage time. According to the DL/T836.1-2016 regulation, short-term outages lasting less than 3 minutes are exempted from calculation. The total annual power outage duration is recorded in the annual report, but no one keeps accounts for ten small jitters a day.
In 2024, the national power supply reliability rate was 99.924%, with an average user power outage of 6.71 hours, ranking among the top in the world, and all statistics are about power outages. In 2023, Guangzhou's comprehensive voltage qualification rate was 99.9998%, which measures the voltage deviation range and also does not include voltage sags.
When converting such accidents into economic losses, the public records left overseas are more complete. There are post-event reports available for checking on how the accident occurred and who the losses are attributed to.
In July 2024, a lightning arrester fault occurred on a 230 kV line in Northern Virginia, and the recloser tried six times in 82 seconds, causing the voltage to drop to 30% to 40% of the rated value six times. According to the regulations, the fault was cleared normally, and no standard required the grid to maintain the voltage at the normal level.
However, these six voltage drops caused the UPS of about 60 data centers to switch to backup power collectively, about 1.5 GW of load disappeared from the PJM grid, the system frequency rose to 60.047 Hz, and the dispatcher urgently reduced the output of Pennsylvania gas-fired units and a nuclear power unit in Virginia. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation conducted a post-event review, listed this type of synchronous off-grid as a new reliability risk, and established a large load working group.
Such incidents are not isolated cases. According to the statistics of a working group white paper, 28 active load shedding events on the user side were recorded from January 2023 to April 2026.
There is no such dramatic scene in domestic public records, but the losses are also being counted. Hou Junda also cited a set of industry statistics in that report, showing that voltage sags account for more than 60% of power quality problems in computing power centers. In the early stage of Guangzhou Yuexin Semiconductor's operation in 2019, it suffered losses more than ten times a year due to voltage sags, with an average annual economic loss of about 8 million yuan.
What really pushed this issue from technical documents to the policy agenda is the *Special Action Plan for Comprehensively Improving Power Supply Quality to Serve the Development of New Quality Productive Forces (2026-2028)* issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration in April 2026. It puts forward 14 tasks from five aspects, refined into 33 key tasks, and aims to achieve full coverage of terminal monitoring for power quality sensitive users by the end of 2028.
Hao Ruifeng, Director of the Market Supervision Department of the National Energy Administration, mentioned in the interpretation that voltage sags affected the production and operation of enterprises in Shanghai and Hainan in 2025. The time from the issuance of this document to the requirement of full coverage is less than three years, which is faster than the transformation plans of most enterprises.
This achievement has taken 40 years to complete. The average user power outage duration has been reduced from 94.55 hours in 1991 to less than seven hours today, but now it is challenged by a new user profile. The requirement of computing power for electricity is actually very simple: the price can be negotiated, but no interruption is allowed.
25-year IOU
Guaranteed Only by Data of a Few Months
The warranty of photovoltaic modules specifies that the mainstream N-type products have an attenuation of no more than 1% in the first year, no more than 0.4% per year thereafter, and a power retention of 87.4% at the end of the 30th year. The previous generation of PERC products has an attenuation of 2% in the first year, 0.55% per year thereafter, and 84.8% power retention at the end of 25 years. These are promises on paper, and the actual measurement curve will not be drawn until 25 or 30 years later.
There is a 10 kW power station built in Yuzhong, Gansu in 1983. When it was 40 years old in 2023, the annual average attenuation of single modules was 0.57%, the total attenuation was less than 20%, and the system efficiency was still about 60%. It is still generating electricity today. It proves that the 25-year service life is not empty talk, and also shows that it took 40 years to get this conclusion.
Ji Huimin said in the interview that the 25-year and 30-year service life promises are actually based on the extrapolation of accelerated tests, lacking large-scale, long-term service empirical data, and the research on the correlation between accelerated aging and actual working conditions is not sufficient. This is the largest quality arrears of the whole industry, which cannot be made up in the short term. She refers to the whole category of new energy products, including photovoltaic modules and energy storage cells.
Ji Huimin also said that the current evaluation system focuses on "factory qualification" and neglects "full life cycle performance". For photovoltaics, people focus on the initial power, but they should pay more attention to the attenuation rate and low light response. For energy storage, people focus on the initial capacity, but they should pay more attention to cycle attenuation and consistency degradation. This judgment is now being confirmed by policies. The three mandatory national standards for photovoltaic energy consumption and efficiency released in July this year included "coupled environmental stress attenuation rate" into the module evaluation for the first time, which will be implemented on January 1, 2027. According to the calculation of Huatai Securities, about 310 GW of inefficient production capacity will be cleared out, accounting for 31% of the total production capacity of the industry.
If the arrears are included in the price, the development of the photovoltaic industry in the past two years will make sense. From January to May 2026, China's new installed photovoltaic capacity was 59.59 GW, down 69.88% year on year. In September, the 1.3 GW module centralized procurement for the South-to-North Water Diversion Project opened for bidding, and the lowest bid for the TOPCon section was 0.710 yuan per watt. The same type of cost index calculated by Shanghai Nonferrous Metals Network in August was 0.715 yuan per watt, and the selling price was half a cent lower than the cost.
The selling price is close to the cost line, which is an arithmetic problem and has nothing to do with morality. The arrears will not disappear, it will move from the expense account of the current year to the power generation of the power station owner ten years later.
Who Is Charging for This 100 Milliseconds
Ji Huimin also added a more critical point: power generation enterprises and grid enterprises will not only be responsible for "electricity quantity" in the future, but also for the "quality form" of power supply. Voltage deviation, frequency stability, harmonic level and outage duration are becoming measurable, comparable and even tradable quality attributes. The word "tradable" is the core of the issue. Once quality can be traded, someone will price it.
American quality management scholar Deming repeatedly quoted a sentence in *Out of the Crisis*: Quality cannot be inspected into a product, which was originally put forward by Dodge, a pioneer of statistical quality control. This sentence is particularly appropriate for power supply. Inspection can only prove that it is not broken, but cannot prove that it will not jitter.
Once the jitter is measured, it changes from a technical problem to a procurement item. The power supply of computing power parks is being divided into multiple layers for sale. The incoming line end relies on dynamic voltage restorers and reactive power compensation devices, the cabinet relies on battery backup units, and the GPU board relies on supercapacitors. What each layer sells is the same thing: no interruption. NVIDIA GB300 has already made supercapacitors a standard configuration. According to the calculation of Minsheng Securities, this equipment market will be 4.8 billion yuan, 6 billion yuan and 7.6 billion yuan respectively from 2024 to 2026, with an annual compound growth rate of about 26%.
In the 2025 semi-annual report of Shenzhen Sinexcel Electric Co., Ltd., the revenue of the power quality sector was 280 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 11.42%, and the gross profit margin was 58.66%. The energy storage business in the same report had a gross profit margin of 27.79%. The comparison of the two figures is clearer: modules are sold at 0.71 yuan per watt close to the cost line, the gross profit of governance equipment is nearly 60%, making profits by expanding scale is hard-earned money, while making profits by improving quality can get premium returns.
The effect of spending money is not virtual. After completing the governance, Yuexin Semiconductor resisted all more than 40 subsequent voltage sags; after the combined scheme of dual power supply, energy storage and governance devices of Guangzhou Power Supply Bureau was put into operation, the yield of automotive-grade chips in the second phase increased to 99.3%. This investment can generate returns, so enterprises are willing to pay for it.
After the equipment, there is a longer account recorded in the standards. Hou Junda said that the China-Central Asia Working Group for the Promotion of High-Quality Joint Development of Water Resources and Electric Power, which was just launched on October 27, will next introduce innovative tools such as the six-dimensional evaluation model of "electric computing power" into cooperation projects, and promote cross-border mutual recognition of association standards and technical specifications such as power engineering quality and electric computing power evaluation.
The model in the report couples three computing power indicators (computing capacity, carrying capacity, storage capacity) with three power indicators (power efficiency, carbon efficiency, power quality capacity). Among them, power quality capacity measures the stability of power supply and whether the data center can participate in grid load regulation in reverse. According to the caliber disclosed by the association in Xiamen, a steady-state voltage deviation of more than plus or minus 3% may trigger GPU frequency reduction, and a voltage sag of more than 10% directly threatens the continuity of intelligent computing.
Hou Junda said in the interview that the working group will promote the cooperation to leap from "hardware interconnection" to "standard interconnection", and is committed to polishing interoperable technical standards, so that China's quality experience can become the "common language" of international cooperation. Equipment export is one-time income, while standard export is long-term rent, which is more worthy of attention than the number of governance devices sold in a year.
The word "quality" is often talked about too softly in the manufacturing industry, and it is easy to become a slogan or an award. Back to the 100 milliseconds, it is a hard cost for computing power enterprises, a hard indicator for the grid, and a hard gross profit margin for equipment suppliers. This cost is currently paid by computing power enterprises, buying governance equipment, energy storage and supercapacitors, none of which can be saved. The grid's design drawings have not been modified yet, because on those drawings, this 100-millisecond jitter is not regarded as a fault so far.