China aims to have a carbon emissions peak by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality in 2060. How would that happen?

Key steps toward these goals include expanding the use of clean energy sources. China has committed itself to raising its non-fossil fuel share of energy consumption – solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy and others – to 20 percent by 2025 and 25 percent by 2030.

Apart from increasing the use of wind and solar power, building more nuclear plants and further developing natural gas resources, hydropower has remained China's stable source of energy.

With the most abundant hydropower resources in the world, China is leading the world in terms of power generation output, cumulative installed capacity and newly added capacity. China has led the world in hydropower production since 2004.

Clean, efficient, safe, stable and relatively low in price, hydropower is considered the first and most mature renewable energy source to achieve large-scale commercial development worldwide. And the degree of hydropower development in major industrialized countries is generally higher.

Currently, hydropower is China's second-largest energy source after coal, and has accounted for roughly 17 percent of China's electricity generation in the past decade. China plans to raise the share of non-fossil fuels in its electricity supply to 39 percent by 2025, up from around 31 percent now.

By the end of 2021, China's installed hydropower capacity was 391 gigawatts (GW), including 36 GW of pumped storage, accounting for 16.5 percent of the country's total installed power generation capacity, according to China's National Energy Administration.

China's hydropower resources are concentrated in the southwest, accounting for about two-thirds of the technically developable hydropower capacity. The southwestern province of Sichuan has the greatest installed capacity of hydropower in China. In 2021, its hydroelectric power capacity amounted to 88.87 GW. Neighboring Yunnan Province followed at 78.2 GW. These two provinces house the majority of China's hydropower plants.