There’s a contradiction in China’s energy story that tends to split a room.
Look one way and you see the world’s biggest coal builder, with new plants still going up. Look at the other and you see the world’s biggest clean-energy build-out: more wind and EVs added last year than the rest of the world combined.
Ember’s China Energy Transition Review 2026 starts from the premise that both pictures are real, but neither is complete.
In 2025, the two trends stopped moving together: clean electricity met all of China’s additional power demand, and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, in a power system that grew 5%. But early 2026 has been bumpier: rising curtailment, integration strains and slowing solar additions have tested how firm that turn really is.
That’s what we discussed at the launch. Was 2025 a one-off, or is the bumpier start to 2026 simply the friction of a transition entering a harder phase? And beneath that: is clean power taking over the functions fossil fuels once performed, or just piling on top of them? Is the momentum durable, and what does China’s turn mean for everyone else? Watch our webinar to find out the answers.
To accommodate global audiences, we hosted two webinars – one for Asia-Pacific time zones and one for Europe and the Americas time zones.
