How China cracked the US ‘super code’ that controls most power grids in the world

China is no longer using American software to run its power grid.

The Southern Regional Electricity Market (SREM) – the largest unified power market on Earth – has switched fully to Tianquan, a home-grown solver developed by Chinese engineers with speeds 14 per cent faster than American products, according to a recent report by official newspaper Science and Technology Daily.

This follows recent reports that the State Grid, Huawei and many other leading Chinese companies have abandoned US solvers. If China no longer needs US code to run its critical systems, other nations may follow – from Southeast Asia to Latin America – and the global balance of technological power will shift.

For decades, nearly every major power grid, financial market and global supply chain relied on high-end solvers – ultra-advanced algorithms developed almost exclusively by a handful of US firms.

Solvers decide when power plants turn on, how markets clear and how trillions in assets are allocated. The United States held a near-monopoly for over 30 years as a silent ruler of industrial civilisation.

These tools, known as the “core of industrial software”, operate as black boxes: fast, reliable but completely opaque. No one outside their creators knows exactly how they work.