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.
That’s more than our two home countries, the UK and Spain, generate from all sources each year.
Low-carbon sources grew so much that coal power in China actually fell slightly.
Where this page came from
This page was imported from Our World in Data. “China added a Germany-sized electricity grid last year” by Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.
Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.
Licence: CC BY 4.0 · Adapted from ourworldindata.org
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