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Since the beginning of the 21st century, due to climate change and other environmental concerns, the energy sector has been shifting rapidly towards renewable energy. Green and low carbon have emerged as new priorities shaping the sector’s future development. This development has not only been put into motion by a whole set of new actors, but it has also involved existing incumbents. While interaction between these two groups of actors has recently received more attention in the sustainability transitions literature, overcoming an original bias towards new entrants, the inner workings of this interaction are yet to be explored. This thesis addresses this research gap. The main question it asks is how the interaction between new entrants (called niche actors, following the sustainability transitions literature) and incumbents (called regime actors) shapes the rapid expansion of renewable energy development (called niche acceleration). This research examines the case study of China. The country not only has the world largest energy sector, with entrenched coal power, but it also experienced rapid growth in renewable energy, in particular wind and solar power. China can therefore serve as an exemplary (or revealing) case study to investigate how the new entrants interact with incumbent actors in shaping the low-carbon transition dynamics in its electricity socio-technical system. The thesis focuses on wind and solar power development from 2000 to 20170F 1 at the national level and within two provinces, Inner Mongolia and Jiangsu, where divergent developments were observed. Inner Mongolia’s rapid wind and solar power development …