This represents a significant step forward for China’s renewable energy transition. This year, the country poured 6.8 trillion yuan, roughly $940 billion, into clean energy. This remarkable figure approaches the $1.12 trillion global investment in fossil fuels for the same year, demonstrating China’s commitment to a sustainable energy future.
In the meantime, renewable energy capacity is growing faster than anyone has imagined. In just the first three months of 2025, China deployed an astounding 72 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy—an 18% jump over last year. The share of wind and solar power in China’s electricity generation reached 26% in April 2025, reflecting a notable shift in the country’s power generation landscape.
Today, solar energy is flourishing in China like never before. From this point, the country’s solar capacity went from 103 GW in 2022 to an impressive 333 GW by 2024. That’s more than the solar capacity of the rest of the world combined. As a result, solar’s share of the national electricity mix has tripled during this time. It then climbed from 4.1% in April 2020 to a remarkable 12.4% by April 2025. Wind power was a significant factor, making up 13.6% of all the electricity generated during this time. That’s more than nuclear.
Our analysis found that fossil fuel generation was down dramatically during the first four months of 2025. That’s a drop of 72 TWh, or a 3.6% annual decline from last year. This decline is a clear sign of China’s real march toward cleaner energy sources and is in line with the country’s larger environmental ambitions.
Biqing Yang, an analyst at Ember Asia, described this transition. He pointed out that China has hit milestone after milestone throughout 2021 and now at the beginning of 2022, driven by this record growth in renewables. For the first time, wind and solar are providing more than a quarter of the country’s electricity. Hurdles are still present when it comes to handling the intermittency of renewables and speeding up decarbonisation in the end-use sectors. Continued efforts at national level power system reform and institutional development are needed to maintain and build on this momentum.
China’s renewable energy sector is booming, led by record installation of wind and solar power. This wave of support arrives at an especially acute time for our country, exacerbated by unprecedented high temperatures logged in 2024. The direction of the country’s energy transition is changing overall power generation mix—establishing new, higher standards for what comes next.