Wind and solar now account for 37% of the total power capacity in the country, an 8% increase from 2022, and widely expected to surpass coal capacity, which is 39% of the total right now, in 2024. Cumulative annual utility-scale solar & wind power capacity in China, in gigawatts (GW)
China added almost twice as much utility-scale solar and wind power capacity in 2023 than in any other year. By the first quarter of 2024, China’s total utility-scale solar and wind capacity reached 758 GW, though data from China Electricity Council put the total capacity, including distributed solar, at 1,120 GW.
China's installed centralized solar power plant capacity comprises over 60 % of the total installed capacity encompassing both centralized and distributed PV systems (National Energy Administration,2023).
In 2023, clean power made up 35% of China’s electricity mix, with hydro the largest single source of clean power at 13%. Wind and solar hit a new record share of 16%, above the global average (13%). China generated 37% of global wind and solar electricity in 2023, enough to power Japan.
The installed solar PV capacity in China increasing from 130.25 GW in 2017 to 392.61 GW in 2022 (IRENA, 2023). Moreover, at the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit, China further announced that the total installed capacity of wind and solar power will reach over 1200 GW by 2030 (The United Nations et al., 2020).
According to the statistics released by the National Energy Administration (NEA) in 2017, the cumulative installed capacity of photovoltaic power generation in the northwest of China was 35.03 GW , accounting for 26.89% of the total installed capacity of PV power generation in the whole country.