China’s carbon emissions have fallen by one per cent for the first six months of 2025, compared to the same period the previous year – a decrease that experts are attributing to solar power development and hailing as a first in terms of “structural” factors, although there is still a long way to go for China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, to meet its carbon neutrality targets.
Policy change drove “rush” towards solar
Published on the UK’s Carbon Brief website, the findings, by Lauri Myllyvirta, reveal that growth in clean power generation capacity, including wind, nuclear and biomass but excluding hydro, significantly outpaced increases in demand in the first half of the year, driven in part by a policy change that took place in June.
The surge in solar capacity saw China install 212 gigawatts of solar capacity in the first two quarters of the year, double the previous year’s record and more than the USA’s entire 178-gigawatt 2024 capacity as the world’s second-largest nation for solar. The nation is also building the world’s largest solar farm covering an area the size of Chicago on a Tibetan plateau.
Described as a “rush,” the increase in solar capacity “is likely to set an annual record for growth in 2025, becoming China’s single-largest source of clean power,” Myllyvirta says. The rise in solar power generation from solar panels, by itself, was enough to meet all the country’s growing electricity demand and is the equivalent of the national power output of Mexico or Türkiye over the same period. The shift means the share of low-carbon sources reached 40% of China’s overall electricity generation from January to June, a four per cent increase year-on-year.
Uncertainty ahead
However, emissions need to fall by much more for China to be on track to meet its decarbonisation goals, hitting three per cent every year for the next 35 years, Myllyvirta points out. This could prove difficult, because, since the national policy change in June that sparked the previous rush has taken place, removing coal-fired-matched price guarantees per unit of solar electricity, there has been a notable slowdown in solar growth. Projections vary for the rest of 2025 and 2026, under the new policy.
What’s more, coal-based chemical production, which the study’s author notes China has “developed aggressively, to reduce reliance on imported oil and gas”, is “much more carbon-intensive” than already carbon-intensive oil-and-gas chemical production. The sector added around three per cent to China’s total CO2 emissions from 2020 to 2024, making it “one of the sectors responsible for the recent acceleration in the country’s CO2 emissions growth and its shortfall against targets,” the study notes.
Nonetheless, commenting on the report’s findings about the difference solar has been making, Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington, welcomed the flatlining in China’s carbon emissions as “a moment of global significance, offering a rare glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak climate landscape.”
