Global fossil fuel decline hinges on China's clean energy

The speed at which the world cuts its use of coal, oil, and gas is now largely driven by China’s government spending on clean energy, London-based energy analysts Ember reports. 

"China is now the main engine of the global clean energy transition," said Dr Muyi Yang, lead author of the group’s China Energy Transition Review 2025, published on Tuesday (9 September).

"Policy and investment decisions made in China over the last two decades are fundamentally changing the basis of China’s own energy system, and enabling other countries to also move swiftly from fossil to clean,” he also said.

In 2024, one in four developing countries got a higher proportion of final energy from electricity than the United States because of Chinese exports.

Falling technology costs are enabling developing countries to skip fossil fuels altogether and directly transition to clean power systems.

Since 2018, Chinese solar exports to Namibia and Cambodia have each exceeded those countries’ entire electricity capacity as of 2023, while Brazil has imported about 90 GW of solar, a third of its total 274 GW system. 

"New energy is achieving in years what took old energy decades," the report says. 

The driving factor is simple: scale of production.

According to Ember figures, Chinese companies produce 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and 60 percent of wind turbines, and also lead exports of batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. 

Companies in these sectors are all frantically looking for places to sell their products to, often for a low price.

The star of the show is solar, with module prices falling over 70 percent between 2022 and mid-2025. 

“These prices make a small solar PV kit far cheaper than a stand-alone diesel generator,” says the report. 

But it's not just raw production power and affordability. 

China is also the world’s top clean energy innovator, filing around 75 percent of global clean energy patents, up from 5 percent in 2000, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency database. 

Within China itself, fossil fuel use across buildings, transport, and industry has shrunk over the past decade.

Coal use in the power sector is still growing, but barely so, with new clean power additions almost matching rising power demand. 

In 2024, clean energy supplied 84 percent of China’s new electricity, and Ember and other analysts suggested that 2025 could be the first year clean power additions exceeded new demand. 

This is seen as a tipping point after which fossil fuel use, especially coal, will start to fall.   

There is no mystery as to why the Chinese energy transition is topping all the charts.

In 2024, China invested $625 billion (€532bn) in clean energy - 31 percent of the global total, with major expansions in storage and grids increasingly part of the investment mix.

“Within China there is a realisation that the old development paradigm centred on fossil fuels has run its course, and is not fit for 21st century realities,” the report says.

Between 2021 and 2024, wind and solar capacity more than doubled to 1400 gigawatts (GW), and battery storage tripled to nearly 95 GW, with 2024 additions alone outpacing those of the US and EU combined.

Some of the new energy additions were wasted because the grid couldn't absorb all the new wind and solar coming online, but with grid investment rising to $85 billion (€72bn) in 2024, up from about $70 billion (€60bn) in 2019, so-called ‘curtailment’ remained at historically low levels (below 10 percent overall). 

This has helped China become one of the most electrified large economies in the world.

Electricity’s share of final energy consumption reached 32.4 percent in 2023. 

"Businesses are investing decisively in clean energy, not just because of climate goals but because it is cheaper, more secure, and the foundation of future competitiveness," said Biqing Yang, an Asia analyst at Ember.

What that means in practice becomes clear when looking at the economic dividends. 

In 2024, investment and production in clean energy contributed $1.9 trillion (€1.6tn) to the national economy, equivalent to about one-10th of China’s GDP, and the sector is growing three times faster than the Chinese economy overall.

According to Ember, China’s clean energy boom means that "for governments betting their economies on coal, oil, and gas exports, the risks are mounting."

"For two decades China was the principal swing state for global fossil fuel demand, driving much of the world’s growth," said Sam Butler-Sloss, Manager at Ember. 

"Now, as its own consumption peaks and begins to decline, and as its clean energy exports scale globally, it is turning a long era of rising global demand into the start of structural decline," he added.