China generated 569.8 TWh of electricity in March, up 5.4% from a year earlier, showed data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on April 17.
The growth rate was 2.5 percentage points higher than in January-February, said the NBS, which typically publishes the data of January and February together to avoid impact of the Lunar New Year.
Clean power generation like hydro, nuclear, wind and solar had a higher growth rate than a year ago, while the growth of thermal power generation slowed down, the NBS said.
In March, hydropower generation was 80.9 TWh, jumping 22% year on year, the highest growth rate since March 2016, as water inflows were abundant in the southern region.
With new reactors put into operation, nuclear power generation reached 28.7 TWh, surging 31.7%, about 8.7 percentage points more than January-February period. Wind generation totaled 34.2 TWh, rising 8.2% year on year, compared to a decline of 0.6% in the first two months. Solar power was 10.1 TWh, up 12.9% YoY, 9.1 percentage points higher than January-February.
Thermal power, mainly coal-fired power, posed a 1% increase year on year to 416 TWh, down 0.7 percentage point from January-February.
In the first quarter, clean energy’s proportion in total electricity output rose 1.5 percentage points from the same period of a year earlier, the NBS said.
In the first quarter, the power generation totaled 1,674.7 TWh, a 4.2% increase year on year, compared with the growth of 8% in the Q1 2018.
Thermal power totaled 1,265.8 TWh (2% YoY), hydro, nuclear, wind and solar were 2,159 TWh (12% YoY), 77 TWh (26.1%), 91.6 TWh (2.2% YoY) and 24.4 TWh (8.6% YoY), respectively.
Source: SXcoal.com
