Annual growth in China's power consumption was cut by nearly half in the past year, based on data from the state's energy watchdog shown on Friday.
According to the National Energy Administration, 5.52 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity were consumed in the country in 2014, an increase of just 3.8 percent. The growth reading indicates a sharp fall from 2013, wherein annual figures show an increase of 7.5 percent.
The data comes after a series of weak economic indicators in December, prompting speculation that the world's second-largest economy may be unable to reach its official growth target of 7.5 percent for 2015.
China's central bank is also expected to push further for easing monetary policies in the first half of the year to address these concerns, Zhu Haibin, chief economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co, said in an email to reporters on Friday.
In a recent briefing, Zhu Zhixin, vice head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), also said that the government aims to rebalance the economy without causing it to lose momentum, and that investment is and will remain a key player in shoring China's economic growth.
Analysts speculate that the drop in growth may also have been influenced by the recent shutdown of large numbers of factories in Beijing. The government cut off an estimated 25 percent of steel production and 3 percent across industries overall in a bid to reduce pollution in time for the APEC CEO Summit held in the capital in November, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
"There's no doubt that the economy stabilized somewhat toward the end of the year, and companies did restart quite a bit of production after selling down inventories during earlier suspensions," said Dai Bing, an analyst with Beijing-based consultancy Coal Network.