BEIJING - The National Energy Administration (NEA) announced Thursday that the country's electrical power consumption rose 9.1 percent from a year earlier in August.

Power use reached 434.3 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh) in August, the NEA said in a statement on its website. The growth rate declined 2.7 percentage points from that for July, the statement said.

In the first eight months of this year, electricity consumption totaled 3.12 trillion kwh, up 11.9 percent year-on-year, the statement said.