China’s clean-energy boom carried 2025 growth as property slump deepened, analysis finds

In northern China’s coal belt, idle cranes loom over half-finished apartment blocks, a stark reminder of a housing boom that has gone into reverse. Thousands of kilometers away in eastern Anhui province, newly built battery and electric vehicle factories run through the night to fill orders headed for Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

New economic analysis suggests it is this fast-expanding clean-energy machine — not the once-dominant property sector — that kept the world’s second-largest economy on track in 2025.

A study released in early February by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), published by the U.K.-based outlet Carbon Brief, estimates that China’s clean-energy sectors generated 15.4 trillion yuan (about $2.1 trillion) in economic output last year. That is equivalent to 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product and roughly the size of the entire economies of Brazil or Canada.

The same research finds that these industries accounted for roughly 37% of China’s GDP growth in 2025 and more than 90% of the net increase in investment, effectively offsetting a historic slump in real estate and traditional infrastructure building.

“Without the clean-energy boom, China’s economy would have grown by about 3.5% last year, instead of the 5% reported by the National Bureau of Statistics,” lead author Lauri Myllyvirta said in an interview. “Clean technologies were the difference between meeting and missing the government’s growth target by a wide margin.”

China’s official figures show GDP expanding 5% in 2025 to 140.19 trillion yuan, meeting the government’s “around 5%” goal. But fixed-asset investment — a closely watched gauge of spending on factories, infrastructure and real estate — fell 3.8% from a year earlier, the first annual decline in decades. Investment in property development alone plunged 17.2%.

Against that backdrop, the clean-energy surge stands out.

What counts as “clean energy”

The report’s conclusions rely on a broad definition of clean energy and a reconstruction of official statistics, rather than on any new category published by Beijing.

CREA groups together spending and output from solar, wind, hydropower and nuclear power; electricity grids and transmission; energy storage such as pumped hydro and grid-scale batteries; electric vehicles and their batteries; EV charging networks; railways as a low-carbon transport mode; and energy-efficiency services. It also uses input-output tables to capture demand for upstream materials and equipment, such as steel, machinery and chemicals, driven by these sectors.

For each segment, researchers estimate both the value of investment — measured as gross capital formation — and the value of goods and services produced, including domestic sales and exports. Those figures are then compared against national GDP and investment data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

The authors acknowledge that their work is an estimate rather than an official breakdown. Imports of some clean technologies are not fully deducted, which slightly overstates the share in GDP, and some price effects will only be reflected in China’s real GDP statistics after deflator revisions. But CREA argues that the analysis captures the broad weight and direction of change in the economy.

“This is not a new statistical system, but a reclassification of existing official data to show how much of China’s growth now comes from clean technologies and the industries that support them,” Myllyvirta said.

From property boom to green boom

In 2022, CREA calculates that clean-energy industries generated 8.4 trillion yuan, or 7.3% of China’s GDP. By 2023, that share rose to around 9%, with investment in solar, batteries and electric vehicles jumping by about 40% and providing the bulk of overall investment growth.

By 2024, the clean-energy economy reached 13.6 trillion yuan, just over 10% of GDP. That year, according to the same research series, it had already grown larger than the value of China’s real estate sales and larger than the country’s entire agricultural sector.

The 2025 figures deepen that shift. CREA’s latest estimate shows the value of clean-energy industries nearly doubling in three years, even as the old pillars of growth — property and heavy construction — weakened sharply.

Official statistics underscore the contrast. While real estate investment fell by double digits and infrastructure spending contracted 2.2% in 2025, manufacturing investment barely inched up 0.6%. Stripping out property, fixed-asset investment still declined 0.5%.

Clean energy moved in the opposite direction. The study estimates that investment tied to clean technologies reached 7.2 trillion yuan in 2025, approaching $1 trillion. That is about four times as much as global investment in fossil-fuel extraction and coal-fired power combined, based on comparisons with international energy agency data cited in the report.

Physical build-out at record pace

The numbers on the ground match the economic calculations.

China added 315 gigawatts of solar power and 119 gigawatts of wind capacity in 2025, according to data from the National Energy Administration reported by industry publications. That is more solar capacity than the rest of the world installed and roughly twice as much wind capacity.

Those additions pushed non-fossil sources — including hydro and nuclear — to 60.4% of China’s total installed power capacity, the first time they have overtaken coal and other thermal generation. Wind and solar together are now approaching half of the country’s capacity.

Electric vehicles and batteries are another pillar. The report estimates that EVs and their batteries accounted for about 44% of the value of China’s clean-energy economy last year and more than half of its growth. Clean power generation, transmission and storage made up around 40% of the clean-energy contribution to GDP and nearly a third of its expansion.

The result is a rapid restructuring of China’s industrial base. Once-dominant property developers are cutting projects and facing restructuring, while provinces hosting battery plants, EV lines and massive wind-solar-storage “bases” in Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang are seeing new waves of investment and employment.

Global prices fall, trade tensions rise

China’s clean-energy boom is not confined to its borders. The buildout of factories and power plants has helped drive down the cost of solar panels and batteries worldwide, making renewable energy more affordable for many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The International Energy Agency has described solar power as “the cheapest electricity in history,” citing Chinese manufacturing scale as a key factor. Some large solar projects in China and India now secure power at prices in the range of $20 to $40 per megawatt-hour.

At the same time, the flood of low-cost panels, batteries and electric cars has fueled accusations in Europe and the United States that Chinese producers are benefiting from unfair subsidies and dumping excess production abroad.

In 2023, the European Commission opened an anti-subsidy investigation into imports of battery electric vehicles from China. The probe concluded in 2024 that “significant” state support existed across China’s EV supply chain, including preferential loans, tax breaks and subsidized land. Brussels announced additional tariffs that could lift duties on some Chinese EVs to the mid-40% range.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce called the investigation “blatantly protectionist,” and Beijing has since imposed anti-dumping tariffs on European products such as pork, brandy and certain dairy goods — measures widely seen by trade analysts as retaliation.

The United States has also raised barriers. In May 2024, the Biden administration announced it would double tariffs on Chinese solar cells and modules to 50% and increase duties on Chinese-made electric vehicles and other strategic products, citing concerns over industrial overcapacity and national security. The subsequent administration of Donald Trump has signaled further tariffs and a tilt back toward domestic fossil fuels, though those policy details are still emerging.

Analysts warn that escalating trade disputes risk fragmenting global clean-energy supply chains, potentially slowing the rollout of low-carbon technologies and raising costs.

A clean-energy surge alongside new coal

The scale of China’s clean-energy expansion has prompted some climate experts to suggest that the country’s carbon dioxide emissions may have peaked earlier than many models predicted, even as its economy continues to grow.

But the same period has seen a renewed push to build coal-fired power plants.

In 2025, 161 gigawatts of new coal power projects were proposed in China, according to data compiled by environmental groups. In 2024, construction started on about 94.5 gigawatts of new coal plants, with China accounting for more than 90% of all new coal power starts worldwide.

Officials and state-owned utilities say the new coal capacity is needed to ensure grid stability and energy security as the share of intermittent wind and solar rises, and to prevent shortages like those that led to power cuts in parts of China in 2021.

Some analysts argue the clean-energy surge is already eroding coal’s dominance. One recent assessment found that coal-fired power generation in China fell by around 1.6% in 2025, while wind and solar’s share of actual electricity generation rose to roughly 22.5% and is climbing.

Environmental groups warn that continuing to approve large volumes of new coal projects even as renewables expand risks creating expensive stranded assets.

“China is building both the clean-energy system of the future and, at the same time, a lot of coal plants that may not be needed for very long,” said one Beijing-based energy researcher who asked not to be named because of the political sensitivity of the topic. “The economic risk is that someone will have to pay for underutilized coal capacity.”

An experiment with global consequences

For now, Beijing appears committed to its twin goals: securing energy supplies and pushing domestic companies to the forefront of global clean technology.

The government has repeatedly highlighted what it calls “new quality productive forces,” a phrase that encompasses advanced manufacturing sectors from semiconductors to new energy vehicles. In that narrative, batteries, grids and high-speed rail lines are meant to replace “houses and highways” as symbols of prosperity.

The new analysis suggests that, at least in 2025, that strategy delivered. Clean-energy industries not only expanded rapidly on their own terms but also played an outsized role in keeping China’s headline growth on target amid a property downturn and weak domestic investment.

Whether the green engine can keep running at its current speed — and how other economies respond to its growing weight — will help determine not just China’s future growth path, but the pace and price of the global transition away from fossil fuels.