In early August 2026, the South China Morning Post reported that Hefei had built China's first quantum-application demonstration substation — and the framing was no small one: "blackouts eliminated entirely." That claim deserves to be unpacked: how the quantum technologies inside the substation address the chronic ailments of conventional grids, and the industrial direction they point toward — China's new-energy exports are shifting from selling wind turbines and batteries to selling entire power grids.
Hefei's quantum-application demonstration substation … can eliminate blackouts entirely.
Indonesia's Blackout and Hefei's Substation Are Two Ends of the Same Story
The video's author had just finished a trip through Southeast Asia, where he saw a piece of local news: a massive blackout had killed more than a thousand chickens at a poultry farm, and farmers carried the dead birds to blockade the power company's offices. At the same moment, Hefei's substation was using quantum technology to stand guard over the grid.
The two events really are the two ends of one story. In most cases, a blackout is not caused by a shortage of total generation but by the grid losing balance in an instant. Electricity cannot be stored at scale — generation and consumption must match in real time. This constraint is called power balance, and in industry shorthand, "generation follows the load." When demand spikes, frequency drops and generating units trip off the grid, like braking so hard the car flips over. To prevent the imbalance, you must first measure the current accurately: voltage is held at its rated value, and all load fluctuation shows up as variation in current, so measuring the current reveals the power deficit and allows make-up dispatch commands to be issued in advance.
The Iron Core's Magnetization Curve Is Not a Straight Line
Traditional substations measure current with electromagnetic current transformers — an iron core wrapped around the conductor. The conductor's large current produces a ring-shaped magnetic field, the core concentrates the field, a secondary coil picks up a small induced current, and the main-line current is inferred. This is classical nineteenth-century electromagnetism, and it remains the physical foundation of conventional grids to this day.
But it carries three congenital defects. At low currents, the iron core is insufficiently magnetized and readings come out low; at high currents, the core saturates — no matter how far the conductor current climbs, the magnetic flux density no longer moves, and the transformer is effectively blinded. Then there is temperature drift: the core's magnetic permeability shifts sharply with the temperature, and seasonal variation alone is enough to distort the readings. That is why traditional substations must schedule frequent manual on-site calibration.
One Nitrogen Atom Replaces a Carbon — With a Vacancy Next Door
The breakthrough in Hefei's substation replaces the iron core with diamond nitrogen-vacancy center sensors. Diamond is a lattice of carbon atoms; replace one carbon atom with a nitrogen atom, and a vacancy is left in the lattice next to it. This "nitrogen-vacancy" structure can trap an extra electron that acts as a pointer. The conductor's current generates a magnetic field; the field acts on the electron's spin, splitting its microscopic energy levels — the larger the current, the stronger the field, and the wider the splitting.
The readout works through optically detected magnetic resonance: green laser light shines on the diamond, the electron absorbs photons and jumps to an excited state, then falls back to the ground state, emitting red light. The frequency gap between the bright state and the dark state is the scale of the magnetic field, and working backward yields the current. The whole process happens at the atomic level, independent of any saturable iron core — which is why it is sensitive, stable, and calibration-free.
Monitoring precision leaps one hundredfold, from one-thousandth to one one-hundred-thousandth; a single substation sheds more than 500,000 kilowatt-hours of metering error each year; the next target for quantum gas sensing is one part in a billion — for detecting flaws in electrical equipment at the earliest possible stage.
The difficulty was that there was no precedent, no standard, and no mature solution — and at one point the supply of high-purity diamond sensing material was cut off from abroad. Everything had to be tested from scratch, and in the end a high-purity diamond was custom-developed together with a materials R&D team. The breakthrough in independent mass production of silicon-28 isotopes is the same kind of story, replayed in quantum-computing materials.
The Other Two Pillars: Quantum Computing and Quantum Communication
Quantum sensing solves "measuring," and quantum computing solves "computing." The substation is connected to the quantum computer Origin Wukong, which uses superposition and entanglement to solve the nonlinear power-flow equations of complex grid topologies — simulating the evolution of faults, handling combinatorial optimization, and forecasting system-wide blackout risk to supply dispatchers with decision options. Quantum communication solves "transmitting": grounded in the no-cloning theorem and the collapse of measurement, control commands and state data travel over 5G plus quantum encryption — defending against hacking and against unauthorized tripping.
The Days of Coal Holding the Line — Are They Over?
Grid design over the past century has relied on a "baseload model": coal power — nonstop, slow to respond, cheap — anchors the ordinary demand, while pumped-storage or gas units, quick to respond, cope with the peaks. The coal and gas giants therefore developed a ready argument — without us holding the line, the grid collapses, so governments must subsidize thermal plants.
The trouble with wind and solar is unpredictability. When they connect to the grid through inverters, they bring high-frequency noise into what was a perfect sine wave, polluting the waveform and continuously disturbing the grid from the supply side. Quantum technology may become the key to changing this picture: string together geographically dispersed wind, solar, hydro, and thermal units with ultra-high-voltage lines (the outward transmission of Zhundong's coal power relies on exactly such a UHV corridor), buffer it with large-scale storage that absorbs more and delivers less, and let intelligent control supported by quantum sensing and quantum computing provide the final safety net — and the fragility that makes renewable grids prone to collapse may be patched by this combination. This extends the thread of From Compute to Electricity — The Physical Constraints of AI Data-Center Power Density: compute demand has pushed the grid to its limits, and quantum technology is changing the rails of the grid itself.
Export a Turbine, or Export a Grid?
Developing countries have urgent demand for green power, but their grid frameworks are fragile and their dispatch tools primitive. Selling wind and solar hardware straight into such markets tends to shock the local grid, causing frequent large-scale blackouts — the most painful stumbling block in new-energy exports. The Indonesian chicken farm is a miniature of that block.
Once a counterpart adopts China's grid system, subsequent grid expansion and software updates bind it to China's technology ecosystem, forming long-lifecycle services — and defining the technical standard of the next generation of power grids worldwide. From Oil State to Electric State — The Fundamental Shift in the Logic of Energy Security argued that the center of gravity of energy security is moving from resources to construction capacity; this essay takes the next step in the same direction: what is being exported is no longer a piece of hardware but a complete power-infrastructure system.
More than wind turbines and batteries, a grid system that is stable, secure, and resistant to collapse is better positioned to determine China's place in global energy competition.