The green transition of China's energy and power industry has become a critical pillar of the country's high-quality development, according to an official of the China Electricity Council.
The National Energy Administration of China (NEA) announced on Saturday that the country's total electricity consumption reached a milestone in 2025, surpassing 10 trillion kilowatt-hours for the first time.
China has become the world's first country to annually consume over 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, exceeding the combined total of power consumed by the United States, the European Union, Russia, India and Japan in 2025, according to the NEA.
This figure is about twice the total power consumption in China in 2015. Using an average annual household consumption of 3,000 kilowatt-hours for a family of three as the benchmark, China's 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity can meet the yearly power needs of more than 3.3 billion households.
This figure would be sufficient to power 150 million electric vehicles on a journey from Earth to the Moon if calculated by China's new national standard of 15 kilowatt-hours per 100 kilometers for electric vehicles.
"China's electricity consumption has surged from 5 trillion kilowatt-hours to 10 trillion kilowatt-hours over the past decade. It's a growth rate unparalleled among major economies globally. China's electricity consumption exceeds the combined total of several economies, reflecting China's role as a manufacturing powerhouse and a populous nation, and showing the comprehensive improvement in China's energy security capabilities. These 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity have been extensively used for people's livelihoods and green transformation, serving as a crucial support for China's high-quality development," said Yang Kun, executive vice chairman of the China Electricity Council.
By 2025, China has achieved a stable and reliable power supply thanks to its clean and low-carbon power generation system, an efficient and interconnected power transmission network, a flexible and intelligent distribution mechanism.
"China's energy and power industry has been providing a strong energy and power guarantee for the country's modernization drive by actively developing a new type of energy system, vigorously cultivating new quality productive forces, adhering to innovation-driven development, continuously advancing green and low-carbon transition, and driving the high-quality leapfrog development of new energy and renewable energy. This provides a strong energy and power guarantee for the construction of Chinese modernization," Yang said.
By the end of November 2025, China's installed capacity of wind and solar power reached 1.76 billion kilowatts, a significant increase of 34 percent compared to the same period in 2024.
In 2025, the proportion of non-fossil energy installed capacity in China exceeded 60 percent, making non-fossil energy the absolute pillar of power generation. Of the total electricity consumption in China, one out of every three kilowatt-hours is green energy.
By the end of 2025, China's pumped storage capacity had exceeded 66 million kilowatts, ranking first in the world for 10 consecutive years.
More than 80 percent of these pumped storage stations have a capacity of 1 million kilowatts or more. Currently, China's new energy storage capacity has exceeded 100 million kilowatts, an increase of more than 30 times compared to the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020).
China's power green transition supports high-quality development
