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U.S. vs. China: Electricity Generation
Electricity generated each year, terawatt-hours
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
United States · Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 3 years
China · Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 3 years
Dashed: the projection from the latest reading. Shaded: the range about two in three outcomes land in. A projection, not a promise.
Ember (CC BY 4.0), compiled from national statistics. Electricity generated, not consumed.
Power is the input every AI data center needs. China passed the U.S. in electricity generation in 2010 and has kept adding to it far faster since, while U.S. generation was roughly flat for a decade before rising again.
What this chart reads
- United States · Electricity Generationas “United States”latest 2025-12-31
- China · Electricity Generationas “China”latest 2025-12-31
Sources
United States · Electricity Generation. Source: Ember, electricity data (ember-energy.org/data), CC BY 4.0. Attribution: "Ember (CC BY 4.0)". Ember compiles national statistics, EIA, Eurostat, the UN and other primary sources into one consistent dataset and fills recent periods from monthly data. Palanor re-reads Ember's public CSV on every run, because Ember revises back data as official statistics land.
China · Electricity Generation. Source: Ember, electricity data (ember-energy.org/data), CC BY 4.0. Attribution: "Ember (CC BY 4.0)". Ember compiles national statistics, EIA, Eurostat, the UN and other primary sources into one consistent dataset and fills recent periods from monthly data. Palanor re-reads Ember's public CSV on every run, because Ember revises back data as official statistics land.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.