Electricity consumption up 12.2% in China in 2011

China's National Energy Administration (NEA) announced on Sunday that the nation's total consumption of electricity from January 2011 through the end of July shot up approximately 12.2 percent when compared to the same time frame in 2010. It's estimated that China consumed nearly 2.69 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity in the first seven months of 2011. In July alone, electricity consumption was up a staggering 11.8 percent year-over-year, coming in at 434.9 billion kWh, according to the NEA.

With consumption of electricity rising rapidly, some analysts doubt China's grid could support an influx of plug-in vehicles and, with the vast majority of the nation's energy coming from coal, we'd question whether plug-in vehicles should even play a role in the moving forward of one of the world's oldest civilizations. Apparently, we're not alone on this one.