China's installed wind and solar capacity has historically surpassed that of thermal power

In the first quarter of 2025, China's wind power and photovoltaic power generation will add a total of 74.33 million kilowatts of installed capacity, with a cumulative installed capacity of 1.482 billion kilowatts (including 536 million kilowatts of wind power and 946 million kilowatts of photovoltaic power generation), surpassing the installed capacity of thermal power (1.451 billion kilowatts) for the first time. In the future, as the new installed capacity of wind power and photovoltaic continues to grow rapidly, it will become the norm for wind and photovoltaic installed capacity to exceed thermal power.

In the first quarter, the total power generation of wind power and photovoltaic reached 536.4 billion kWh, accounting for 22.5% of the total electricity consumption of the whole society, an increase of 4.3 percentage points over the same period last year (driving the proportion of non-fossil energy power generation to 39.8%, an increase of 4.8 percentage points year-on-year). Affected by the rapid growth of wind power and photovoltaic power and the low year-on-year growth rate of electricity consumption in the first quarter (2.5%), the total power generation of wind power and photovoltaic increased by 111 billion kWh compared with the same period last year, significantly exceeding the increase in electricity consumption of the whole society (58.2 billion kWh).