How much each country invests in electricity per person: the United States, China and Mexico

Bajío Ventures · June 2026

Headline investment totals mislead: a country of 1.4 billion people will always seem to spend more than one of 133 million. The useful question for investors is a different one: how much does each country put into its power system per person, and per dollar of its economy? Seen that way, the distance between the United States, China and Mexico changes shape.

The numbers

	United States	China	Mexico
Annual power investment	≥ USD 208 bn (2025)	~USD 241 bn (2025)	~USD 6.5–7 bn (2025–2030 plan average)
Population	~343 m	~1,405 m	~133 m
Per person per year	≥ USD 600	~USD 170	~USD 50
Nominal GDP	~USD 30.6 tn	~USD 19.5 tn	~USD 2.1 tn
Share of GDP	≥ 0.68%	~1.2%	~0.3%

United States: projected capital expenditure of EEI member utilities, which serve about 250 million people; it excludes independent generators and public and cooperative utilities, so it is a floor. China: 1.73 trillion yuan of total power investment in 2025 (generation 1.09 trillion, grid 0.64 trillion), converted at ~7.2 yuan per dollar. Mexico: public investment in the 2025–2030 Strengthening and Expansion Plan (624.6 billion pesos, ~USD 32.7 billion according to SENER) plus USD 6–9 billion of expected private investment, spread over six years; it is a plan, not money spent. GDP and population rounded.

Three readings

1. Mexico invests twelve times less per person than the United States and more than three times less than China. And China is no longer electrifying: it is reinforcing a grid that connected its last household in 2015. Mexico competes for the same manufacturing plants as Texas and Jiangsu with a fraction of their investment in the infrastructure those plants need.

2. Per dollar of economy, China invests the most. The United States spends more per person because it is richer and its equipment costs more; the relative effort is China’s, at around 1.2% of GDP every year. Mexico puts in about 0.3%: a quarter of China’s effort and less than half of the United States’.

3. The money goes to different places. In 2025 China put 37% of its power investment into the grid. CFE’s plan puts about 20% into transmission. The country that invests least also puts the smallest share into the hard part.

Caveats

• A dollar does not buy the same everywhere. A transformer or a kilometre of line costs considerably less in China than in the United States. At purchasing-power parity, China’s investment per person would sit closer to the US figure.
• The sources are not identical. The US figure is a floor from a subset of companies; China’s is the sector total; Mexico’s is a six-year target. They show orders of magnitude, not decimals.
• The United States replaces, China expands. Much of US spending renews an ageing grid; much of China’s adds new capacity. Both, for different reasons, spend far more than Mexico.

What it implies

For Mexico to match the United States’ effort as a share of GDP, it would need about USD 14 billion a year, twice what the plan foresees. To match China’s, about USD 25 billion a year, almost four times as much.

The public budget alone will not close that gap. In practical terms, it is the size of the market for private capital: on-site generation and storage at the load, substations and interconnection lines financed by industrial users themselves, and the mixed schemes with CFE. In the Bajío, where industrial load is growing faster than the grid, the per-person gap translates into something very concrete: plants that cannot connect in time.

Sources: EEI, electric companies to invest nearly USD 208 billion in 2025, Oct 2025 · People’s Daily / CEC, 2025 grid investment, Feb 2026 · GDSHE / China Electric Power Knowledge Base, 2025 power investment review · CMIC / SENER, investment of more than 620 billion pesos in the power system · CMIC / SENER, private investment 2025–2030

Bajío Ventures — a Mexican energy-infrastructure investment group based in Guanajuato: capital, a data platform on the region’s industrial base, and a German industrial channel, with its own advisory presence in Berlin.