Space is big. So begins Douglas Adams’ famous meditation on scale in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
China’s electricity grid is like that. You may think Texas has a big grid, or that Germany’s renewable buildout is impressive, but that’s just peanuts to China.
In May 2025, China installed 93 gigawatts of solar capacity. In a single month. That’s nearly three times what the United States will add in all of 2025. By mid-year, China’s combined wind and solar capacity crossed 1.4 terawatts, surpassing coal for the first time. The country is building a dam in Tibet that will generate three times the output of the largest hydropower station ever constructed. Transmission lines thread through Himalayan passes at 4,700 meters, carrying electrons 2,000 kilometers in seven milliseconds.
If the Guide had an entry for China’s power system, it would probably just say: Don’t Panic. But do pay attention.
The Mix
Start with coal. Yes, coal. China operates 1,161 coal-fired power plants, more than four times as many as India, the second-place country. These plants still generate roughly 55% of China’s electricity. In the first half of 2025, China approved 25 GW of new coal capacity and may commission 80-100 GW this year alone, potentially setting an annual record.
If you stopped reading here, you’d conclude China is doubling down on the dirtiest fuel on Earth. You’d be wrong.
Here’s what else happened: China’s solar capacity crossed 1.1 terawatts by mid-2025, enough to power roughly 275 million American homes. Wind capacity hit 570 GW, with 223 GW more under construction. In early 2025, combined wind and solar capacity surpassed coal for the first time ever.
The apparent paradox resolves when you understand what China is actually building. Those new coal plants aren’t meant to burn coal around the clock. They’re designed as peaker plants, ramping up and down quickly to balance intermittent solar and wind. Some are required to run less than 20% of the time. In most of the world, natural gas plays this role. But China has never embraced gas; it doesn’t want to depend on foreign pipelines. So coal becomes the flexible backup in a system increasingly dominated by renewables.
It’s the kind of pragmatic solution that would make a Vogon bureaucrat proud, if Vogons cared about anything beyond poetry and paperwork.
The Geography Problem
China’s electricity system faces a fundamental physics problem: the power is in the wrong place.
The wind blows in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, northwestern provinces with vast open spaces and not many people. Solar radiation is strongest in the Gobi Desert. The Yangtze River carves through southwestern mountains, far from the coast. Meanwhile, the factories, data centers, and 500 million urban residents are concentrated along the eastern seaboard, thousands of kilometers away.
Xinjiang alone hosts 38 GW of solar capacity and nearly 99 GW more in the pipeline. Inner Mongolia aims for 150 GW of wind and solar by year’s end, generating 300 billion kWh annually. These are renewable resource bases on a scale that exists nowhere else. But without a way to move electrons east, they’re just expensive scenery.
Enter the ultra-high-voltage grid. Since 2009, China has built a network of 42 UHV transmission lines, a continental-scale electrical highway system operating at 800 kV DC and 1,000 kV AC. These are voltages that make American grid engineers nervous just thinking about them. In 2025, China’s west-to-east transmission capacity will exceed 340 GW, up 25% from five years ago. Last year alone, 2.4 trillion kWh flowed from west to east, enough to power five Germanys, with over 80% coming from clean sources.
The newest line, connecting Xinjiang’s Hami region to Chongqing, spans 2,260 kilometers. Electricity makes the journey in 0.007 seconds. The Ningxia-Hunan line, commissioned in October 2025, was specifically designed to carry power from wind and solar bases in sandy deserts to central China. And Tibet, once isolated from the national grid, now exports hydropower to Hubei Province via a 1,900-kilometer DC link that traverses some of the most challenging terrain on Earth.
The State Grid Corporation plans to invest a record 650 billion yuan ($91 billion) in grid infrastructure this year alone. China holds over 80% of the world’s UHV-related patents. The Infinite Improbability Drive remains fictional, but ultra-high-voltage transmission is very real.
The Dam to End All Dams
If coal is China’s flexible backup and solar is its growth engine, hydropower is its ballast.
The Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2006, remains the world’s largest power station by installed capacity: 22.5 GW across 34 turbines. Over 30 years, it has generated 1.7 trillion kWh, saving 550 million tonnes of coal and avoiding 1.49 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions. The dam and five others along the Yangtze form a clean energy corridor spanning 1,800 kilometers with 71.7 GW of combined capacity.
But Three Gorges is about to be eclipsed.
In Tibet, construction has begun on the Medog Hydropower Station, a 60 GW project on the Yarlung Tsangpo River that will generate 300 TWh annually, three times the output of Three Gorges. The $136 billion project, scheduled for completion in 2033, won’t be a conventional dam but rather four 20-kilometer tunnels blasted through mountains, diverting water to turn turbines before rejoining the river. It will be one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in human history.
Hydropower’s great advantage is dispatchability. Unlike solar and wind, you can turn it up and down as needed. In a grid increasingly dominated by intermittent sources, that’s invaluable. It’s also why China continues building pumped hydro storage; the 3.6 GW Fengning facility in Hebei, completed in 2024, is now the world’s largest.
The Nuclear Card
China’s nuclear program operates on a timeline that Western regulators would find incomprehensible.
Since 2015, China has built 37 reactors with an average construction time of 6.3 years, beating the global average of 9.4 years. The fastest build took just 4.1 years. As of early 2026, China operates 59 reactors with 62 GW of capacity, second only to the United States, with another 28-30 reactors under construction, the most of any country for 18 consecutive years.
In April 2025, Beijing approved 10 new reactors at a cost of $27.45 billion, the fourth consecutive year of approving at least 10 units. The reactors will spread across Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shandong, Fujian, and Guangxi, all coastal provinces where China’s nuclear fleet is concentrated near population centers hungry for baseload power.
China builds nuclear reactors for roughly $2.7 billion per unit. Compare that to the UK’s Hinkley Point C ($63.7 billion for two reactors) or America’s Vogtle plant ($35 billion with years of delays). The cost advantage comes from standardized designs, indigenous supply chains, and coordinated industrial policy. By 2030, China’s nuclear capacity is expected to reach 110 GW, overtaking the United States as the world’s largest nuclear power producer.
The technology is advancing too. In 2023, China commissioned the world’s first commercial fourth-generation reactor at Shidao Bay, a high-temperature gas-cooled design using helium instead of water. The Linglong One, a small modular reactor, is scheduled for 2026. Nuclear provides only about 4.5-5% of China’s electricity today, but with ambitions of 200 GW by 2035 and 400-500 GW by 2050, that share will grow substantially.
The Curtailment Problem
All of this sounds like a clean energy triumph. And in many ways it is. But there’s a worm in the apple.
Curtailment, the forced shutdown of wind and solar when the grid can’t absorb their output, is rising. In the first half of 2025, solar curtailment hit 6.6%, up from 3.9% a year earlier. Wind curtailment reached 5.7%, up from 3%. In Tibet, solar curtailment spiked to 33.9% from just 5.1%. In Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and other northwestern provinces, localized rates have touched 20%.
The math is brutal: China added 268 GW of wind and solar in just the first half of 2025, nearly matching total US wind and solar capacity ever installed. But grid infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. The result is stranded electrons, spinning turbines and gleaming panels producing power that goes nowhere.
The government raised its national curtailment limit from 5% to 10% in 2024, essentially acknowledging the problem. Investment in grid infrastructure increased to 608 billion yuan in 2024 and continues growing by 12% annually. Battery storage capacity tripled in three years. But analysts say China may need to double grid investment by 2030 to keep up with renewable additions.
It’s the same problem that’s bedeviled renewables everywhere: building generation capacity is easier than building the infrastructure to deliver it. China is simply doing both at scales that make everyone else’s challenges look, well, like peanuts.
The Bottom Line
In the first half of 2025, clean energy growth was so strong that fossil fuel generation actually fell 2% year-over-year, even as electricity demand kept rising. Coal-fired generation declined for the first time since China’s industrial revolution began. Some analysts believe China’s power sector emissions may have already peaked, possibly as early as March 2024.
China’s 2035 climate commitments call for wind and solar capacity of 3.6 TW, six times the 2020 level. Non-fossil fuels should exceed 30% of energy consumption. These aren’t aspirations; they’re likely underestimates if current trends continue.
The energy mix breakdown tells the story: Coal at 55% but falling. Hydro at 14%, reliable and dispatchable. Solar at 11% and climbing fast. Wind at 10.5%. Nuclear at 4.5%, with massive buildout underway. Low-carbon sources now exceed 40% of the electricity mix, up from 34% just a year ago.
Cleantech contributed over 10% of China’s GDP in 2024. China accounts for 31% of global clean energy investment, spending $625 billion last year alone. Chinese companies lodge 75% of global clean energy patent applications, up from just 5% in 2000.
What’s happening in China isn’t just an energy transition. It’s the construction of a new kind of state, one whose power derives not from oil wells or gas fields but from manufacturing prowess, grid engineering, and sheer scale. An electrostate, in the truest sense of the word.
The implications ripple outward. If China can decarbonize its electricity system while growing its economy, the central argument against climate action, that it requires sacrifice, weakens considerably. Chinese solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are flooding global markets, driving down costs everywhere. The west-to-east power transmission technology is now being deployed in Brazil, with more countries likely to follow.
Douglas Adams wrote that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. China’s answer to its energy future appears to be 42 ultra-high-voltage transmission lines, 1.4 terawatts of wind and solar, and a willingness to build at scales that most countries can barely comprehend.
Whether that future is one the rest of the world should celebrate or fear depends on questions the Guide never quite answered.
For now, the electrons keep flowing.
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