The country has announced or begun construction on enough projects for total wind and solar capacity to likely reach 1,371 gigawatts by 2025, the climate research firm said in a new report. That would vastly outstrip a goal set by President Xi Jinping in late 2020 of having 1,200 gigawatts of panels and turbines by 2030.
Still, the country is mining record amounts of coal and building a new fleet of generators powered by the fossil fuel - and striking new long-term deals to buy natural gas - in order to avoid shortages that have plagued its electricity system in recent years. Clean power installations in 2023 could hit 154 gigawatts of solar, 55.7 gigawatts of onshore wind power and 8.3 gigawatts of offshore wind, according to BloombergNEF forecasts.