China’s growing investments in clean energy are pushing its use of fossil fuels into decline.
Renewable forms of electricity provided more than 80 percent of new demand in China last year, according to new research by Ember, a global energy think tank. Then, in the first half of this year, it met all new demand for power in the country, pushing fossil fuel use down 2 percent compared to the first half of 2024.
As the world’s largest emitter of planet-warming pollution, China has poured money into the production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other clean energy technology. That has helped drive down the price of those goods and boosted exports to other fast-growing economies, the analysis said.
“China is now the main engine of the global clean energy transition,” Muyi Yang, the lead author of Ember’s China Energy Transition Review 2025, said in a statement. “Policy and investment decisions made in China over the last two decades are fundamentally changing the basis of China’s own energy system and enabling other countries to also move swiftly from fossil to clean.”
