China is simultaneously the world’s largest polluter and the world’s largest investor in clean energy, making the answer complicated. The country now operates 1.4 terawatts of solar and wind capacity, more than the European Union, United States, and India combined, and 41% of all new cars sold there in 2024 were electric or plug-in hybrid. At the same time, China still burns more coal than any other nation. The green transition is real and accelerating, but it’s layered on top of a fossil fuel system that hasn’t disappeared yet.
Renewable Energy at an Unprecedented Scale
No country has ever built clean energy infrastructure as fast as China is doing right now. As of mid-2025, China has 1,080 gigawatts of solar capacity and 570 gigawatts of wind capacity in operation. Together, that 1.4 terawatts accounts for 44% of all utility-scale solar and wind capacity on the planet. In 2024 alone, China brought 357 gigawatts of new solar and wind online, roughly the entire installed electricity capacity of France and Germany combined, added in a single year.
Offshore wind is another area of dominance. China added 4.4 gigawatts of offshore wind in 2024, representing 55% of all global offshore installations that year. The country also accounts for about one-third of all clean energy investment worldwide, a figure large enough to visibly contribute to overall GDP growth.
Coal Is Declining, but Still Dominant
Here’s the tension at the heart of China’s green story: coal still generates a huge share of the country’s electricity. But for the first time in decades, that share is shrinking in absolute terms, not just as a percentage. Electricity generation from coal fell 1.6% in early 2025 compared to the year before, a drop of about 90 terawatt-hours. That happened because clean energy grew fast enough to cover all new electricity demand and then some, pushing coal out of the mix.
This is a meaningful turning point. For years, China added renewables but also added coal, so total emissions kept climbing. Now, clean power growth has outpaced demand growth since early 2024, and coal-fired generation and the carbon emissions tied to it have been falling as a result. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan set a target for non-fossil fuels to reach about 20% of total energy consumption by 2025, alongside a 13.5% reduction in energy use per unit of GDP compared to 2020 levels.
When Will Emissions Actually Peak?
Climate analysts at the Climate Action Tracker project that 2025 could mark the peak of China’s CO2 emissions if the current pace of clean energy deployment continues. Under a more conservative scenario, emissions plateau at current high levels until around 2030, then decline about 2% per year through 2035. Under an optimistic scenario with faster coal phase-down, emissions peak this year and decline at roughly 2.6% annually.
Either way, the trajectory has shifted. China’s official pledge is to peak emissions before 2030, and the country appears likely to beat that target by several years. Peaking, though, is just the beginning. The speed of decline afterward will determine whether China’s transition happens fast enough to meet global climate goals.
Electric Vehicles Are Now Mainstream
China’s electric vehicle market has crossed the threshold from niche to normal. In 2024, total sales of new energy vehicles (battery electric and plug-in hybrid) hit 12.9 million units, making up 40.9% of all vehicle sales for the year. By December, the monthly penetration rate reached 45.7%, meaning nearly half of all new cars sold that month had a plug. Just one year earlier, that December figure was 37.7%.
This shift has happened faster than almost anyone predicted. Government subsidies and purchase incentives helped in the early years, but at this point the market is largely self-sustaining. Chinese automakers like BYD produce EVs at price points that compete directly with gas-powered cars, removing the cost barrier that still slows adoption in other countries.
Moving Power Across a Continent-Sized Country
China’s best solar and wind resources sit in the deserts and plains of the north and west, thousands of kilometers from the factories and cities of the east coast. Solving that geography problem required something no other country has built at this scale: an ultra-high-voltage (UHV) transmission network.
As of April 2024, China had 38 UHV lines in operation, with a combined length exceeding 48,000 kilometers by the end of 2020. These lines carry electricity at voltages high enough to minimize energy loss over vast distances. One early showcase, the Xiangjiaba-Shanghai link completed in 2010, stretches across eight provinces and delivers up to 6.4 gigawatts of hydropower to Shanghai, meeting as much as 40% of the city’s electricity demand.
The network is now being expanded specifically for renewables. In 2023, construction began on a dedicated line linking solar and wind bases in the Ningxia region in the northwest to Hunan province in the south. More such lines are planned to connect desert-based renewable installations to population centers on the opposite side of the country.
Energy Storage Is Scaling Fast
Renewables need storage to handle the mismatch between when the sun shines and when people use electricity. China is building storage capacity at a pace that mirrors its solar and wind expansion. By the end of 2025, total installed energy storage (including batteries and pumped hydro) reached 213.3 gigawatts, up 54% from the prior year. New battery and other advanced storage technologies alone hit 144.7 gigawatts, an 85% year-on-year increase.
In 2025, China deployed 189.5 gigawatt-hours of new storage capacity, with energy capacity growing 73% compared to 2024. Pumped hydro, a decades-old technology that uses water reservoirs as giant batteries, still makes up about 31% of total storage. But lithium-ion batteries are rapidly becoming the dominant technology, driven by the same manufacturing scale that has made Chinese EVs so affordable.
Cleaner Air, Longer Lives
One of the most tangible results of China’s green push is air quality. Fine particulate pollution (PM2.5), the kind most dangerous to human health, dropped 40.8% across China between 2014 and 2023, according to the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index. Beijing saw the largest improvement, with pollution falling 55.2% in a decade. For residents of Chinese cities who remember the dense smog of the early 2010s, the change is visible and personal.
There was a slight uptick in pollution from 2022 to 2023, a reminder that progress isn’t perfectly linear. But the overall trajectory represents one of the fastest improvements in air quality any country has achieved, directly translating into longer life expectancy for hundreds of millions of people.
China Controls the Green Supply Chain
China’s green ambitions extend well beyond its own borders. The country dominates the global supply chain for nearly every material and component that the clean energy transition depends on. For 19 out of 20 strategically important minerals, China is the world’s leading refiner, holding an average market share of 70%. For rare earth elements used in wind turbine magnets and EV motors, China controls about 91% of global refining.
The dominance is even more extreme in batteries. China holds 80% or more of the global market in key battery manufacturing stages, and for certain cathode materials it maintains a near-monopoly with shares above 95%. This means that whether solar panels go up in Texas or wind turbines spin off the coast of Scotland, much of the underlying supply chain runs through China.
This positioning is strategic. It gives China enormous economic leverage in a world increasingly dependent on clean energy technology, and it has already led to trade tensions, with China imposing export controls on certain critical minerals in response to geopolitical disputes.
Reforestation on a Massive Scale
China’s greening effort extends literally to the ground. In 2024, the country planted 4.45 million hectares of new trees and restored 3.22 million hectares of grassland. Forest coverage now exceeds 25% of China’s total land area, a significant increase from the low points of earlier decades when deforestation and desertification were major concerns. Large-scale tree-planting programs, particularly the “Great Green Wall” aimed at holding back the Gobi Desert, have made China one of the few countries where forest cover is expanding rather than shrinking.
The Contradictions Are Real
China is going green at a speed and scale that no other country matches. It is also still the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, still building some new coal plants (often justified as backup for intermittent renewables), and still exporting coal-fired power technology to other countries. The country’s per-capita emissions, while lower than the United States, have been rising for years.
What the data shows is not a country that has gone green, but one that is in the middle of an energy transition so large it reshapes global markets. Clean energy deployment is no longer a side project or a talking point. It has become a core economic strategy, and the sheer momentum of investment, manufacturing, and installation makes a reversal increasingly unlikely. The question is no longer whether China’s transition is happening, but whether it’s happening fast enough.