Energy is an important fundamental guarantee for realizing the overarching goal of building a modernized socialist power in the middle of this century, as proposed in the report of the 19th National Congress. Energy demand and total consumption will continue to increase with advancement of industrialization and urbanization, and implementation of the rural revitalization strategy. In the past 40 years of reform and opening up, although China's economic and social development has yielded remarkable achievements, the contradiction between rapid economic and social development and the supply of energy resources and the ecological environment has become increasingly apparent. China's development therefore faces the dual constraints of energy and environment, which relate to the country's socialist modernization. In this new era, in the process of realizing the country's ambitious development goals, China faces multiple constraints, such as insufficient energy support, ecological environmental protection, and global climate change pressures. Major challenges and issues much be addressed regarding how to address the energy resource-related characteristics of China's lack of oil, decreased supply of gas, depleted uranium, and relatively rich coal supplies. Under the pressure of ecological environment and global climate change is the issue of exploring energy sustainable development programs possessing Chinese characteristics to address the ambitious development goals along with the contradictions and conflicts, such as energy shortages and environmental climate constraints. In this work, we analyze the current status and development trends of China's major non-renewable energy sources. The study also elaborates on the sharp contradiction between China's extensive future development goals with a lack of energy supply and with environmental limitations. It points out that energy and environment are important factors that constrain China's future economic and social development, and are also related to realization of the grand goal of socialist modernization. The basic situation and the development trend of primary energy in China are analyzed in terms of production and consumption of primary energy and its influence on the environment and social development. Opportunities and challenges faced by China's energy development in this new era are also discussed. We propose that in the new era of energy, strategies with Chinese features must be precisely developed based on energy endowment characteristics within the country. The main elements of this include: adhering to open source and throttling; in the future, improving on the proportion of renewable energy in China's energy mix and achieving low carbon emissions and energy transformation though use of wind power and photovoltaics, which will be primary resources for China; and establishing the primary energy in the form of an upgraded version of the coal industry, and striving to create a modernized energy system with high energy efficiency, advanced technology, low pollution, low emissions, low impact on ecological environment, diversified energy structure, and safe and stable supply. In the context of promoting energy production and a consumption revolution in the new era, strategies addressing the dual constraints faced by economic and social development in China, and their countermeasures, are of strategic significance for energy security, ecological security, and economic security for China.