Where China’s electricity comes from in 2026

Originally published February 3, 2014. Updated July 22, 2026.

China now gets about 18% of its electricity from wind and solar combined, up from roughly 4% in 2015, and in 2025 its coal-fired generation dropped in absolute terms for the first time since 2015, even with demand still rising. That’s a different grid than the one running in 2013, when China’s power system covered roughly 1,250 gigawatts of installed capacity and fossil-fuel plants made up under 70% of that total.

The scale today

That 2013 baseline came with fast demand growth too. Electricity use rebounded to 7.2% growth that year, pushed by heavy industry like steel and autos.

Wind and solar have since grown from a small slice of the grid into its fastest-growing piece. Combined wind and solar capacity reached 1,408 gigawatts by the end of 2024, up from 635 gigawatts two years earlier in 2022. That was enough to pass coal’s own installed capacity for the first time sometime in the first half of 2025. Output is catching up too. In the twelve months through June 2025, wind and solar generated 2,073 terawatt-hours, more than hydropower and nuclear power produced together, plus what bioenergy contributed on top, a combined 1,936 terawatt-hours in that same stretch.

Coal, still the biggest source, now shrinking

Coal remains the largest single source of China’s electricity. In 2015, coal-fired plants supplied more than 72% of the country’s generation. Pinning down an exact coal-only percentage for the most recent year is harder, since some current tallies group it with gas and oil generation, so the clearer read is the direction rather than one static number.

The direction points down. In 2025, coal-fired generation fell by roughly 90 terawatt-hours, a drop of about 1.6%, even as electricity demand grew about 5% for the year. Ember’s count put the decline at 71 terawatt-hours, the first year China’s coal generation has fallen in absolute terms since 2015. Over that same year, solar generation reached 336 terawatt-hours, up 40% from the year before.

The wind and solar build-out

China built its way to those numbers fast. In the first half of 2025 alone, it added 213 gigawatts of new solar capacity, more than the total installed solar capacity of the entire United States, plus another 52 gigawatts of wind. Combined wind and solar output grew 27% year over year over that same stretch.

Clean power is also absorbing almost all of the country’s new demand for electricity. In 2024, wind, solar, hydro and nuclear together supplied 84% of the growth in China’s electricity demand, compared with only 16% of demand growth between 1991 and 2000. That’s close to a full reversal of the old pattern.

Curtailment and the grid lag

Curtailment, power a wind or solar farm could generate but the grid doesn’t take, was already a live problem when Michael Davidson, then an MIT researcher on Chinese energy policy, reviewed China’s 2013 grid data in a piece cross-posted to Energy Central in February 2014. Davidson pointed to an improving wind capacity factor that year, tied partly to early curtailment-reduction efforts.

More than a decade later, curtailment is climbing again. In the first half of 2025, China’s solar curtailment rate rose to 5.7%, up from 3.0% a year earlier, and wind curtailment rose to 6.6%, up from 3.9%, based on National Energy Administration data. Bloomberg reported the numbers under the headline “China’s Record Renewables Buildout Is Wasting Power as Grid Lags.” Curtailment cuts directly into a wind or solar farm’s capacity factor, the share of a plant’s maximum possible output it delivers, so a rising curtailment rate is a real cost even while total wind and solar output keeps growing. It also means power that already exists, built and ready, goes unused instead of reaching homes and factories.

How China’s mix compares to the US

Side by side, the two grids are built around different fuels. If you’re reading this from the US, your own electricity mostly comes from natural gas. The US drew 43.1% of its power from natural gas in 2023, with coal at 16.2% and nuclear at 18.6%. Renewables supplied 21.4% of US generation that year, with wind alone accounting for 10.2% of the total. Hydro added 5.7%, and solar added 3.9%. China runs a different setup. Wind and solar alone supplied 18% of China’s generation in 2024.

The two countries are pulling these figures from different years and different reporting systems, so treat this as a general comparison. If you want to see how differences like this show up in what people pay for power, electricity prices by country is worth a look.

What’s changed since 2013, at a glance

Line up the two eras side by side:

Source: Energy Central (2013 China grid review, cross-posted February 2014), Ember China Energy Transition Review 2025, Ember China country page.

What would change this picture next

The clearest number to watch is whether coal’s 2025 decline turns out to be a one-year dip or the start of a longer slide. One year of falling coal generation doesn’t yet prove China’s power demand has permanently outrun its need for coal plants.

The other number worth tracking is curtailment. If solar and wind curtailment keep climbing past their first-half 2025 levels, that will mean new transmission and grid flexibility haven’t caught up with the pace of construction. If those rates level off or fall instead, China’s grid operators will have kept pace with record wind and solar additions without wasting the power those plants produce. Either way, the answer will show up in the same two places this article draws on, the generation-by-source figures Ember and China’s National Energy Administration publish each year, and the curtailment rate that comes with them.