China's installed electricity generation capacity reached 2.79 TW by the end of September, a 12.3% rise from a year earlier, official data showed.
This came after 2.76 TW by the end of August, suggesting 30 GW of capacity was installed in September.
Wind installed capacity was 400.21 GW, up 15.1% year on year, and solar capacity rose 45.3% to 521.08 GW, showed data from the National Energy Administration on October 23.
Hydropower installations totaled 419.49 GW, a 3.4% rise from a year earlier, while thermal capacity reached 1.37 TW, a 4.3% rise year on year. Nuclear capacity rose 2.2% to 56.76 GW.
China's power generation of all sources totaled 745.6 TWh in September, a 7.7% rise from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics showed. During January-September, China's power generation totaled 6,621.9 TWh, a 4.2% rise from 2022.
In the first nine months of this year, raw coal consumption for heating was registered at 229.69 million tonnes, up 6.3% from the previous year.
During January-September, utilization of all power generation units averaged 2,716 hours, down 83 hours from a year earlier.
By source, the utilization of hydro-based units declined 362 hours to 2,367 hours. The operation of solar units declined 45 hours to 1,017 hours, while nuclear, wind and thermal operations rose 148 hours, 49 hours and 49 hours to 5,724 hours, 1,665 hours and 3,344 hours, respectively.
During the given period, coal-based power plants averagely consumed 304.9 g of coal equivalent to generate 1 KWh of power, up 0.6 g/KWh from a year earlier.
China invested a total of 553.8 billion yuan ($75.83 billion) in major power projects over January-September, a 41.1% increase year on year. Investment on solar farms soared 67.8% to 222.9 billion and nuclear power rose 46.0% to 58.9 billion yuan. The investment on grid projects rose 4.2% to 328.7 billion yuan.
(Writing by Riley Liang Editing by Emma Yang)
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