China, the world’s largest electricity market, now has more installed electricity generation capacity from solar than from coal plants. The news comes at just the right time – as China’s EV sales boom, as global energy prices spike, and as climate change continues to ravage the Earth.
Chinese state-run media announced this week that the country now has a total of 1,288 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, just edging out the country’s 1,285 GW of coal capacity for the first time.
Solar now makes up 31.5% of China’s total installed generation capacity, making it the largest type of generation capacity in the country, with coal dropping to second place. In 2023,
However, this does not mean that China is using more coal power than solar power yet. All power plants will deliver only some percentage of their nameplate capacity, with some generation methods typically being close to their nameplate capacity all the time, and some falling short of it.
In the case of solar, since the sun isn’t always shining, capacity/utilization factors are typically somewhere in the 25% range, and for coal, they’re often somewhere in the 50% range – though all of this varies based on each grid’s characteristics.
So China is still using more coal for generation than solar, but that number is falling. In the first half of 2026, wind and solar combined made up 24.6% of Chinese electricity generation, while coal made up 49.7%. This marks the first time that coal has made up less than half of Chinese electricity generation.
Solar capacity has been growing rapidly in China, as the country installs massive solar farms at a breakneck pace.
However, solar installations slowed down this year compared to last, as China eliminated feed-in tariffs that guaranteed prices to solar generators, forcing them to compete on the market. But since solar is cheaper to build than most forms of electricity generation, installations have continued.
Last year, coal use declined in China while it went up in the US, which was big news as the rapidly developing Chinese economy was still able to grow without expanding coal power. But despite that Chinese coal share has dropped this year, total coal use has ticked back upwards this year so far due to increased electricity demand (and due to lower use of fossil gas for electricity generation as prices spike).
Another part of the reason for this is long-term coal plant contracts that keep polluting coal-fired generation running, supplying grid electricity and forcing curtailment of renewables even when they are available. China continues to build new coal plants despite this, though grid-connected batteries (whether chemical or thermal) can help to avoid this problem.
All this solar growth is important right now, as China, the world’s largest auto market, is rapidly electrifying. Sales of pure EVs are up, and sales of everything with an engine are down. It’s obviously better to fuel those cars renewably than with fossil power – especially since prices of the most common fossil-powered energy used to fuel cars, oil, are currently spiking everywhere as America slowly loses a war of choice started by an senile ex-reality TV host who cannot legally hold elected office.
And of course there is the matter of climate change – if the world’s largest electricity market, and current largest CO2 emitter (though not the country that has contributed most to climate change, by a longshot – that’s the US), can clean up its act, that’s going to make a big dent in climate change. It seems to be moving in that direction, though like basically everywhere else, that movement needs to be much faster.
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