China’s power mix is still dominated by coal, but the direction of travel is becoming harder to ignore. In 2025, China generated around 10,575 TWh of electricity. Thermal power, still accounted for about 6,327 TWh. This means that coal remains the central part of the country’s power system. It is not being replaced quickly, and it would be wrong to suggest that China is moving away from coal in absolute terms in the near future. What is changing is the marginal source of growth. In 2020, China generated roughly 2,083 TWh from renewables, if we define renewables as hydro, wind and solar. By 2025, that had increased to about 3,763 TWh. In five years, renewable generation rose by around 1,680 TWh, or roughly 80%. That increase alone is larger than the total annual electricity generation of many major economies.
The composition of that growth is also important. Hydro remains large, but it is no longer the main driver. Hydropower generation increased only moderately, from around 1,355 TWh in 2020 to 1,462 TWh in 2025. The real change came from wind and solar. Wind generation rose from about 467 TWh to 1,128 TWh. Solar rose from around 261 TWh to 1,173 TWh. Solar generation therefore increased more than fourfold in five years.
Nuclear power adds another layer to this shift. It is smaller than wind, solar or hydro in the current mix, but it is growing from a more stable base because it can provide high-utilisation, lowcarbon generation. In 2025, China produced about 485 TWh of nuclear electricity, equal to around 4.6% of total generation. China had 60 operating reactors and 58.7 GW of nuclear capacity as of May 2026. More importantly, it had 36 reactors under construction, which would add another 38.9 GW of capacity. If built out, that would lift China’s nuclear capacity by roughly two-thirds from today’s level. In a system where coal still carries the baseload burden, this matters.
Including nuclear, the shift is even clearer. China’s clean power generation from hydro, nuclear, wind and solar reached about 4,248 TWh in 2025, equal to roughly 40% of total electricity generation. In 2020, the equivalent figure was close to 2,449 TWh, or around 32%. The change is not small. In a system the size of China’s, a few percentage points in the power mix represent very large fuel volumes. The forward pipeline points in the same direction. China already has more than 1.8 TW of installed wind and solar capacity, with another 448 GW of wind and utility-scale solar projects under construction. This is around half of the global total under construction. On the nuclear side, China’s construction pipeline is also the largest in the world, giving it a second nonfossil source of baseload growth alongside the much faster expansion of wind and solar.
The IEA’s latest outlook is also relevant. It expects all of China’s additional electricity demand in 2026-2030 to be met by lowemissions sources, mainly renewables and nuclear. It also expects China’s total renewables share in power generation to approach 50% by 2030, up from about 37% in 2025. Solar and wind combined are expected to rise from 22% of generation in 2025 to 37% by 2030. This does not mean coal disappears from the picture. Coal-fired generation is still enormous, and China continues to maintain coal capacity for system reliability, regional security and peak demand. The recent rebound in coal-fired output in early 2026 also shows that weather, grid congestion and curtailment still matter. A system with very large solar and wind capacity still needs flexibility, storage and transmission investment.
For shipping, the more relevant point is that the upside for imported thermal coal is becoming more constrained. If most incremental power demand is supplied by RES and nuclear, then coalfired generation may flatten even while total electricity demand continues to rise. That matters for dry bulk because China is still the main swing factor in seaborne thermal coal trade. A plateau in coal-fired generation does not automatically mean a fall in coal imports, as domestic production, prices, stockpiling and import arbitrage all matter. But it does reduce the probability of sustained import growth driven purely by higher power demand. The same logic applies, to a lesser extent, to LNG. Gas is a smaller part of China’s power mix than coal, but stronger nuclear and renewable generation limits the long-term role of gas in baseload power. LNG demand can still grow through industry, winter heating, price competitiveness and substitution away from coal, but powersector demand is less likely to provide the same structural pull as in some other Asian markets.
Overall, China’s energy transition should be seen less as an immediate negative shock for shipping and more as a cap on future fossil-fuel import growth.
Data Source: Intermodal