No other large energy-consuming country has such an outsized impact on both fossil fuels and renewables consumption than China. Its economic growth and infrastructure build-out in the last three decades have changed the world of energy. But now China is changing and setting the pace of the global energy transition, the International Energy Agency IEA said in its new World Energy Outlook 2023 report this week.
“But slower growth results in China’s total energy demand peaking around the middle of this decade; with stable and then slowly declining demand, clean energy growth is sufficient to drive a decline in fossil fuel demand and hence emissions,” the IEA said. “As China’s demand growth slows, clean energy pushes fossil fuels into decline,” is a bold statement from the agency which also predicts global peak oil, natural gas, and coal demand to occur by 2030.