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July 20, 2010 10:03 AM EDT
China has rebuffed a report that it has overtaken the United States as the largest consumer of energy in the world in 2009, media reports said.
The report quoted Zhou Xian, an official with the National Energy Administration (NEA), as saying "IEA's data on China's energy use is unreliable."
IEA said China’s energy consumption surpassed the US by 0.4 percent at 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalent in 2009 whereas the US consumed 2.17 billion tons.
In February, China’s National Bureau of Statistics had put the total energy consumption in the country at 2.132 billion tons of oil equivalent.
Both the agencies deploy different techniques to calculate the energy consumption leading to variations in the assessments, said a NEA official, according to the Chinadaily.
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Commenting that the IEA report ignored China’s measures to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, Zhou Xian highlighted the country's contribution to carbon-free energy generation.
He said China has surpassed the US in generating clean energy from various sources such as hydropower, solar power, nuclear power and wind power.
In 2000, the United States -- the world's largest economy -- consumed twice as much energy as China. But China, which is now the world's third-largest economy, now consumes more than the United States, said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist, according to a report from Financial Times on Monday.
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