Ember: coal power has stalled in 17 of the 26 Chinese regions it tracks

Coal generation has plateaued or turned flat between 2021 and 2025 in 17 of the 26 provincial-level regions with significant coal generation that Ember tracks, and the 17 together account for more than half of China's thermal capacity, according to the think tank's China Energy Transition Review 2026, published September 8, 2026. Thermal generation, most of it coal, fell 0.7% in 2025 while electricity demand rose 5%, the report says. The last time thermal generation fell was 2015, when demand grew only 0.5%, which the report calls the slowest rate since 1974.

China's official statistics carry the same numbers. The National Bureau of Statistics' 2025 statistical communiqué, published February 28, 2026, puts thermal power generation at 6,327.15 billion kWh, down 0.7%, within total generation of 10,575.25 billion kWh, up 4.8%, with electric power consumption up 5.0%. The bureau's thermal category covers electricity from coal, oil, gas, residual heat, pressure and gas, and biomass. The same communiqué shows total coal consumption up 0.1% and crude oil consumption up 3.6% in 2025, so the decline is in coal burned for power, not in China's coal or oil use overall. Ember says its monthly China electricity data is based on NBS and National Energy Administration figures "with some processing."

One year is not a trend, and the report says so: "A single year of falling coal generation does not, on its own, prove a structural shift." Its evidence for something longer is the 12-month moving average, on which it says coal generation "shows signs of stalling after years of continued expansion," a stall it dates to early 2024. The 17 include Shandong and Hunan, which the report calls established industrial centres.

On the flexibility side, Ember says battery storage overtook pumped hydro in installed capacity by the end of 2024 and grew a further 84% in 2025. The fleet is also cycling harder: average utilisation, measured in equivalent full cycles a year, roughly doubled between 2022 and 2025, from 146 to 299 cycles for standalone batteries and from 80 to 199 for batteries co-located with renewables. Compressed-air storage grew more than sixfold between 2023 and 2025, flow batteries more than tenfold and molten-salt thermal storage almost tripled, from what the report calls relatively low bases.

Electricity reached 28.8% of China's final energy use in 2024, up from 22.3% in 2015, against around 23% in Europe and about 21% in the United States, per the report. Passenger EVs, counting battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars together, were 67.2% of new sales in June 2026. Electric truck sales more than doubled in 2024 and again in 2025 to reach 26% of new truck sales, and China accounted for nine of every ten electric trucks sold globally. For scale, The Duck Curve's coverage of Norway's August 2026 registrations put zero-emission cars at 98.68% of new passenger car registrations, and battery-electric vehicles alone took 24.9% of Australia's new vehicle market the same month; Ember's China share counts plug-in hybrids too. Across eight industrial sectors, the report says, fossil fuel use has fallen between 26% and 71% from its peak; Ember's release puts the declines at 26% in food and beverages, 52% in transport equipment and 71% in fossil fuel extraction.

The report is explicit that 2026 has been rougher: "slowing solar additions, curtailment pressures and growing integration challenges tested the transition's momentum." It ties the slowdown to Document No. 136, the February 2025 policy that moved newly commissioned renewable projects from guaranteed benchmark tariffs to market-based pricing, with projects completed before June 1, 2025 allowed to keep the old arrangements. Developers front-loaded commissioning into the first half of 2025, and Ember reads the drop that followed as "a period of adjustment rather than a reversal of the earlier expansion." The pricing reform sits alongside a fiscal shift The Duck Curve covered in China's 2% consumption tax on lithium-ion batteries, collected from September 1, 2026, which taxes mature chemistries while sparing sodium-ion, solid-state and fuel cells through 2028.

Ember frames the result as energy security for an economy that imports more than 70% of its oil. The report cites "multiple estimates" that EVs displace gasoline at around 0.4 to 0.5 million barrels per day and "broader estimates" of avoided oil demand at around or above 1 million barrels per day. Clean-technology exports surpassed USD 220 billion in 2025 and were 6.6% of China's exports in the first half of 2026, up from 2.7% in 2020. China's latest Five-Year Energy Plan, covering 2026 to 2030, expects oil and coal consumption to peak by 2030 with electrification reaching 35%, up from about 30% in 2025, per the report.

Outlook

Ember's own hedge is the one to watch: the 2025 decline "may prove more than a one-year anomaly," and the report attributes the slowdown in additions that followed the June 1, 2025 pricing deadline partly to the front-loading before it. The report's own condition for peaking coal is that clean electricity meet all additional demand; if 2026's slower solar additions leave that condition unmet, thermal generation would rise again even while the provincial plateaus hold. The report also passes on an industry estimate that China's gasoline demand could fall around 5.5% in 2026; against the NBS figure of crude oil consumption up 3.6% in 2025, a fall in the 2026 communiqué would be the first national-level sign of the oil peak the Five-Year Energy Plan expects by 2030.