We’ll often see headlines quoting how many gigawatts of new solar farms or coal plants China is building. But it’s hard to get a meaningful sense of scale for how electricity generation in China is changing.
The chart puts it in perspective.
In 2025 alone, China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh). This is compared here to the total amount of electricity that whole countries generate each year.
Germany generates almost exactly that amount. That means China effectively added a Germany-sized grid to its electricity system in just one year.
What’s also quite staggering is that almost all of this new generation came from solar and wind. China generated 340 TWh more electricity from solar than the year before.
Low-carbon sources grew so much that coal power in China actually fell slightly.
by ourworldindata
4 Comments
**Data source:** [Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026](https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/)
**Tools used:** OWID-Grapher and Figma
Wild how they’re building infrastructure at this speed while coal actually went down – puts all those “but China burns coal” arguments in different perspective.
Seems like an arbitrary list of countries not gathered by any particular list. Canada [produced 623 terawatt hours of electricity](https://energy-information.canada.ca/en/energy-facts/clean-power-low-carbon-fuels) in 2024, only second to Brazil on this list. The US [produced 4308 terawatt hours of electricity](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/unitedstates/). What an odd selection of countries, and the text feels completely LLM generated with the excessive single sentence, hype-provoking paragraphs all too common in LLM authored text.
Meanwhile USA “let’s burn something like the cavemen we are!”