China plans to cap its energy consumption at 3.89 billion tonnes of standard coal equivalent this year, sources learned from an industry meeting held on January 13.

The world’s top consumer also aims to reduce energy use per 10,000 yuan GDP by 3.9% year on year in 2014, the state-owned Economic Information Daily reported, citing a local official.

To curb the fast growth in energy use and reform an economic structure that relies heavily on high energy-consuming industries, the Chinese government has set its energy consumption target at 4 billion tonnes of standard coal equivalent by 2015, and vowed to reduce energy use per 10,000 yuan GDP by 16%.

Data showed that the country consumed a total of 3.76 billion tonnes of standard coal equivalent in 2013, up 3.9% from the year before, while energy use per 10,000 yuan GDP dropped 3.7% year on year to 0.737 tonne of standard coal equivalent.

In the next two years, the country should control its annual energy use within 120 million tonnes of standard coal equivalent and decrease energy use per 10,000 yuan GDP nationwide by at least 3.91% per year.

To realize this, China would take it the top priority to transform the mode of energy consumption and strictly control the total energy use in industries with high energy consumption and excess capacity (e.g. steel, cement, etc.) this year.

Besides, the world's biggest polluter will implement differentiation policies in regional energy use, encouraging use of non-fossil fuels in the eastern provinces.

In 2013, non-fossil fuels accounted for 9.8% of China's primary energy use, up from 9.1% in 2012, showed preliminary data from the National Energy Administration (NEA).

This signals the country is making progress in its clean-up efforts, and non-fossil fuels are set to grow their share to 10.7% this year, the NEA said.

Coal's share in the energy mix dropped 0.9 percentage point year on year to 65.7% in 2013, and is expected to fall below 65% in 2014.