China’s rapid renewable build out is finally displacing coal in a hot summer

It has been a long time coming. After years of a massive build out of renewables and battery storage, finally, in the middle of hot summer that drove electricity demand to new record levels, China’s coal power generation and CO₂ emissions are declining from the same period last year because new renewable generation is meeting the additional demand, and some. Lauri Myllyvirta first called it in Carbon Brief back in May, and now official data from the first half of 2025 confirmed this profound turning piont:

Clean-energy growth helped China’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions fall by 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024.

The CO₂ output of the nation’s power sector – its dominant source of emissions – fell by 3% in the first half of the year, as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand.

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The growth in clean power generation, some 270 terawatt hours (TWh) excluding hydro, significantly outpaced demand growth of 170TWh  in the first half of the year.

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Coal use in the power industry fell by 3.4% compared with the same period a year earlier, while gas use increased by 6%, resulting in a 3.2% drop in emissions for the sector overall.

This is as much, if not more, of a monument as the successful negotiation of the Paris Agreement. Bloomberg noted that this trend is persisting well into the summer heat:

That’s even more impressive when you consider how much more power demand there is. The seasonal peak probably came in early August at a level about 100 gigawatts higher than last year, government officials said.

This summer, authorities have only asked factories to cut back use for a few hours one night in one province — Sichuan on July 17 — to make sure there was enough electricity to go around.

Besides wind and solar additions, China is building out power lines and battery storage to try to use those renewables when they’re most needed.

One day, the grid discharged almost 20 gigawatts of batteries at 95% capacity — the equivalent of turning on 20 nuclear reactors for about two hours — to meet peak demand across three provinces.

China’s hot summer is showing that clean energy and secure energy can go hand in hand.

Hell yeah.