An industrial park in China’s Hangzhou city has been transformed without expanding its footprint, integrating renewable energy, battery storage, smart grids and efficient resource management.
The park combines solar and wind power, bidirectional EV charging, virtual power plants and real-time digital monitoring to optimise energy generation, storage and consumption while reducing emissions.
India can apply this integrated approach to both new industrial cities and existing manufacturing clusters by setting measurable decarbonisation targets, investing in shared clean-energy infrastructure and adopting digital energy-management systems.
An industrial park need not be a mere collection of factories linked by roads, with plots, utilities and a green belt. It can instead be designed around how energy is generated, stored, shared, watched and used, alongside efficient management of resources.
That is what I saw during a recent visit to Hangzhou Green and Low-Carbon Digital Energy Port in China’s Zhejiang province. The demonstration park is significant because industrial parks in China account for about 31 per cent of the country’s carbon emissions, according to a figure cited by Tsinghua University.
The Hangzhou park aims to cut annual carbon emissions by 8,717 tonnes and reduce carbon-emission intensity by 45.9 per cent by 2030. It also plans to generate more than 12.15 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of solar power each year.
The initiative forms part of Zhejiang province's broader effort to incubate zero-carbon industrial parks. At the national level, China's carbon-peak action plan for 2026-2030 sets a more ambitious target: developing around 100 national zero-carbon industrial parks and 500 zero-carbon factories by 2030.
The experiment holds lessons for India, where industrial clusters and parks are central to manufacturing growth but face the twin pressures of expanding production and reducing emissions.
The Hangzhou energy park is a retrofit of the Shangcheng Industrial Park, established more than three decades ago, in 1993. It covers just 0.61 square kilometres but is home to more than 1,000 enterprises, including seven listed companies.
Retrofitting an established industrial park is no easy task. Electricity is supplied through eight switching stations, while annual consumption exceeds 40 million kWh, pushing existing infrastructure close to capacity. There is no spare land to develop. The solution, therefore, was to add "not a single inch of land" but transform the ageing industrial estate into an "energy prosumer": one that generates energy as well as consumes it.
The project began in 2025 under the leadership of Gao Xiang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Its work focuses on four areas: generation, storage, consumption and conservation. Around 200 technologies, products and systems developed by 16 enterprises based in the park have been incorporated into the project.
According to the park's brochure, the initiative has since generated 5.745 million kWh of green electricity annually, increased the share of renewable energy in its energy mix from 1.8 per cent to 12.9 per cent, and reduced carbon-emission intensity by 18.3 per cent. It has also delivered annual savings of about 3,350 tonnes of standard coal and 8,717 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
The park has three buildings that serve as benchmarks for different approaches to low-carbon development: a zero-carbon tower; a near-zero-carbon incubator, clad in what the park describes as China's first oversized, full-facade cadmium-telluride solar curtain wall; and a low-carbon office complex for enterprises.
The park combines several solar technologies, including cadmium-telluride, heterojunction and perovskite tandem cells, installed across five building surfaces, with wind power. Energy is stored in liquid-cooled, immersion-cooled and solid-state batteries. Ground-source heat pumps provide heating and cooling, while a direct-current system linking solar generation and storage avoids the 5-8 per cent energy loss associated with AC-to-DC conversion.
The underlying principle is straightforward. Wind and solar generation fluctuate with the weather, so generation, grid supply, demand and storage must be managed together to keep electricity reliable, affordable and clean.
Even the car park doubles as an energy installation. Vehicles are parked beneath solar carports, with each bay equipped with a QR code for charging. An overhead rail-like structure carries a movable charger, allowing the charging point to be brought to the vehicle rather than requiring a separate charger at every bay. The park also operates a bidirectional charging network covering 800 charging points. This allows compatible electric vehicles to feed electricity back into the grid during periods of peak demand, effectively turning them into mobile storage units.
The park also operates a virtual power plant with 31.9MW of peak-shaving capacity. An algorithm integrates the microgrids serving its 37 plots, helping to balance demand and reduce energy costs.
What is particularly striking is the role of digital technology in managing these systems. A central platform, known as the "Smart Energy Brain", connects more than 3,000 pieces of equipment and monitors how energy is generated, stored and consumed. The park's wider digital network can connect up to 350,000 devices, enabling it to respond rapidly to changes in demand.
Inside the incubation centre, a wall of screens arranged in the shape of a tree displays the park's vital signs in real time. Green-power penetration stands at 22 per cent, battery charge at 86 per cent, and forecast accuracy at 85 per cent for electricity demand and 91 per cent for solar generation. The display also reports zero equipment failures, an equipment-health index of 95 per cent and a running total of 2,010 tonnes of carbon emissions avoided. Here, emissions are not merely calculated and reported once a year. They are displayed in real time, on a public screen for anyone walking past to see.
The park is also a place where technology is built and tested. One board in the incubation centre showed 96 national high-tech enterprises, 701 valid invention patents, six accredited laboratories, two incubators, a maker space and a pilot-scale base. Nearby, a wall of company logos carried the line "One Park, One Core Industry, Digital Energy". The park has chosen one core industry, and many of its firms make pieces of the same puzzle: smart meters, inverters, battery management, motors, chargers, virtual power plant software. The park is both their showroom and their test bed, as its own retrofit shows.
The park also showcases how industrial waste can be used, how materials can be recycled, and how emerging technologies can remove or capture carbon. One demonstration is about converting waste gases into useful products, while the other is about using microbes to capture carbon. In the courtyard stands what looks like a sculpture, a metal tree with perforated leaves. It is a direct air capture unit (DAC)—though it is still an emerging technology with open questions on cost, energy and scale and cannot yet be considered as a substitute for cutting emissions.
India is not short of industrial parks or plans to build more. The India Industrial Land Bank maps 4,523 parks across 770,000 hectares, including 306 plug-and-play parks and 20 industrial parks and smart cities led by the National Industrial Corridor Development Corporation. In August 2024, the Cabinet approved 12 more industrial cities across 10 states, worth ₹28,602 crore and covering about 10,500 hectares. Two are in Uttar Pradesh, at Agra and Prayagraj. Dholera in Gujarat, a flagship project, spans 920 sq km, has a platinum green rating from the Indian Green Building Council and plans a 4,400 MW solar park, of which 300 MW is commissioned.
The question is whether these projects are underpinned by a vision comparable to Hangzhou's.
Official material on flagship projects like Dholera refers to smart grids, underground power networks, zero-wastewater discharge and renewable energy integration. The third edition of India's industrial park rating system, launched in September 2025, also places greater emphasis on sustainability and green infrastructure. But there is scope to go further. Industrial parks could adopt explicit targets for the share of renewable electricity, energy storage, peak-demand management and digital integration, alongside real-time monitoring of energy use and emissions.
There is an important distinction between generating renewable power and integrating it into an industrial park's energy system. Dholera's solar park supplies electricity to the state grid. Hangzhou, by contrast, seeks to coordinate energy generation, storage and consumption within the park itself. The latter approach makes the industrial estate, rather than just the individual factory or the electricity grid, the unit of energy management.
India need not replicate Hangzhou's technology choices. But the underlying idea is transferable. An industrial park could be assessed not merely by the land it develops, the roads it builds or the factories it attracts, but also by how it generates, stores and distributes energy, manages materials and waste, and protects its natural surroundings.
The Hangzhou park's exhibition describes energy as the bloodstream, industry as the skeleton and digitalisation as the nervous system. Making this vision work requires developers, manufacturers, utilities and government agencies to act together. New industrial cities, including those planned at Agra and Prayagraj, have an opportunity to incorporate such systems from the outset. Existing industrial clusters could begin with energy audits, followed by shared infrastructure and real-time monitoring platforms.