China's installed power generation capacity has passed 4 terawatts (TW), the National Energy Administration (NEA) said on June 25 - making it the first country to reach the milestone.

It took eight years for China's capacity to grow from 1TW to 2TW, four years and four months to reach 3TW, and less than two years to add the fourth terawatt, NEA data show. The 4.01bn-kilowatt total is about 1.7 times the combined installed capacity of the EU and the US, and equal to nearly 30% of the world's total, according to Xinhua.

Non-fossil sources - nuclear, hydro, wind and solar - accounted for 62% of China's installed capacity by the end of May, up from 25% in 2010, while renewables' own share climbed from 24% to 61% over the same period, the NEA said. “The milestone will not only help safeguard China's energy security, but also accelerate the green, low-carbon transition and strengthen scientific and technological self-reliance,” said Yang Kun, executive vice chairman of the China Electricity Council.

The scale is the point. China is building out its grid faster than any economy in history has built anything comparable, and it is doing so as part of a deliberate push to become the world's first Electrostate - a country whose economic and strategic weight rests on electrons rather than barrels. That push sits alongside, but is distinct from, China's parallel rise as the world's green energy champion, the two reinforcing rather than substituting for one another.

The capacity milestone landed the same day China's economic planners published a new five-year roadmap for how they intend to keep widening the lead. The 15th Five-Year Plan for Building a New Energy System, issued jointly by the National Development and Reform Commission and the NEA, targets an electrification rate - the share of final energy consumption delivered as electricity - rising from 30% in 2025 to 35% by 2030, energy analyst Dave Jones (@CleanPowerDave) noted on X.

“China already has one of the most electrified energy economies in the world,” Jones wrote, adding that the five-percentage-point rise planned for 2025-2030 is faster than the four-point increase recorded between 2020 and 2025, when the rate stood at 25.9%. Reaching 35% by 2030 would put China five years ahead of the 35%-by-2035 global electrification target set out in the COP31 Action Agenda, Jones said, since matching that global pace would require adding only 1.3 percentage points a year against the 1.0-point annual pace China's own plan implies.

The plan's sectoral detail, still to be published in full, is expected to cover an expansion of heat-pump deployment, a doubling of EV charging infrastructure to 40mn units by 2030, new heavy-truck refuelling and recharging corridors along major freight routes, and a push to electrify inland shipping, Jones said. The published plan itself sets non-fossil energy at 25% of total energy consumption by 2030, with wind and solar exceeding half of installed power capacity and non-fossil sources supplying half of all generation. Pumped-storage hydropower capacity is targeted to reach about 160 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 and new-type energy storage 300GW, while renewable hydrogen production is set to hit 2mn tonnes.

A less-noticed feature of the plan is its treatment of the country's fleet of electric vehicles as a grid asset in its own right: Beijing wants the aggregated, adjustable charging capacity available from vehicle-grid interaction to reach about 50GW by 2030, alongside a separate build-out of virtual power plants with more than 50GW of regulating capacity. Between them, the EV fleet and the grid it feeds are meant to absorb the swings that come with putting more wind and solar onto the system.

That electrification drive is being matched by an equally rapid expansion of nuclear power.

Beijing's nuclear building spree

China currently has 30 to 35 nuclear reactors under construction, roughly half of the 60 to 70 under construction worldwide, energy analyst Peter Clack (@PeterDClack) wrote on X, with plans to reach 150 reactors and 150-200GW of capacity by 2035. The country's 58 operational reactors supply about 5% of its electricity, Clack said, even as construction of new coal plants continues, albeit at a slower pace than the six a month China was adding until recently.

That build-out has already delivered a symbolic milestone: China's installed nuclear generating capacity has overtaken France's for the first time, reaching 63.98GW against France's 63GW, according to World Nuclear Association figures reported by Newsbase - putting China second globally behind the US's 96.9GW. Beijing's State Council approved eight more reactors in late July: three pairs of Hualong One (HPR1000) units and two Guohe One (CAP1400) units at a new plant in Laiyang, Shandong province. China National Nuclear Corp said 10 Hualong One units are already in commercial operation, with 37 more approved for construction.

China is also pushing the technological envelope. The Linglong One reactor, a 125-megawatt small modular reactor (SMR) built at the Changjiang site on Hainan island, is in pre-commissioning testing and is billed as the world's first land-based commercial SMR to reach that stage, according to Newsbase. Beijing's new five-year plan sets a target of about 110GW of operating nuclear capacity by 2030, relying mainly on third-generation pressurised-water reactor technology.

The contrast with the US is stark. Washington has no new conventional light-water reactors under construction, though it retains the world's largest operating fleet - 94 reactors supplying almost a fifth of US electricity, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute and the Energy Information Administration. Momentum is building instead behind next-generation technology: TerraPower's Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, formally began construction on April 23, after the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its first-ever construction permit for a commercial non-light-water reactor. The 345-megawatt plant, which pairs the reactor with molten-salt energy storage, is targeting first power by the end of the decade.

Europe, by comparison, still runs about 180 operational reactors, including France's fleet of 57, with a further eight to 10 under construction, according to World Nuclear Association and International Atomic Energy Agency data cited by Clack. None of that is enough to close the gap with China's build rate, which continues to expand faster than anywhere else on the planet.