Renewables doom overlooks global boom

Hey Reader, welcome to The Energy's weekly data newsletter. This week we explore the data debunking the notion that the world is walking away from renewable energy.

Spectacular solar

Reading the US and UK energy news headlines you'd be forgiven for thinking that the world's love affair with renewables is souring, but if there’s a grain of truth to that it’s largely confined to anglophone countries.

Around the world, the affair is becoming even more torrid. The International Energy Agency expects renewable energy capacity additions to increase by another 9%-22% in calendar 2025 to reach 750 gigawatts (base case) to 840 GW (accelerated case).

That’s after a 22% increase to 685GW in 2024. Spectacular solar deployments — utility and rooftop — account for nearly 80% of the growth, thanks to plunging solar panel prices (down 60% since 2023 in China and anywhere else not waging a trade war).

It’s no surprise China is leading the way in clean energy deployment, responsible for nearly 60% of global growth, and — to the consternation of Western security and supply chain hawks — manufacturing.

The IEA levels off the growth rate in the years to 2025, but renewable capacity growth still doubles to 4,600GW globally (base case) or increases two-and-a-half times to 5,500GW (accelerated case). (These projections are in the IEA’s Renewables 2025 published earlier this month)

Renewable energy capacity growth doubles in the next five years under the IEA's base case. *Source: IEA Renewables 2025*

India overtakes US

What’s less widely known is that there’s a growing list of developing economies lining up to emulate China’s successes in clean energy deployment and manufacturing.

Who would have expected India would be headed for an additional 345GWs, overtaking the United States as the second largest national growth market through to 2030? Or Pakistan to come from nowhere to add 60GWs of solar and hydro to 2030? ASEAN to add nearly 10GWs?

Or the Middle East and Africa to get on the leaders’ board thanks to Saudi Arabia charging into utility solar and South Africans joining Pakistanis’ rooftop solar-powered revolt against unreliable utilities peddling coal power?

No-one who sees the world through an anglophone lens, that’s for sure. All it takes is to cast your gaze a little wider.

(ASEAN includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Brunei, Cambodia and Laos.)

India is set to overtake the US as the largest renewables growth market in the next five years, and Pakistan has come from nowhere. *Source: IEA Renewables 2025*

Turning points

It’s taken a while for all this investment in clean energy to take a decent bite out of fossil fuel markets.

But the signs are it may be starting to happen.

Chinese LNG imports have fallen by nearly a fifth just this year to date, and Pakistan is attempting to defer costly cargoes from Qatar that it doesn't need.

The IEA notes that of the 2,500GWs of non-hydro renewable energy deployed worldwide since 2010, 80% has been in fossil fuel importing countries.

Those countries have saved themselves approximately US$1.3 trillion on 700 million tonnes of coal and 400 billion cubic metres of gas that they might otherwise have had to import, the agency estimates.

Ember, a London-based energy think tank, noted some other potential tipping points in its Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025, released on the same day as the IEA’s Renewables 2025 report.

In the first half of calendar 2025, growth in generation of wind and solar energy around the world totalled 403 terawatt hours, outstripping growth in global demand (369TWh) and resulting in reductions in fossil fuel generation (minus 27TWh) and hydro, bioenergy and other renewables (41TWh).

Nuclear generation increased by just 33TWh, or about one -thirteenth of the increase in solar and wind generation.

Growth in solar and wind generation outpaced growth in power demand in the first half of calendar 2025, and fossil fuel generation fell. *Source: Ember Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights*

Emissions down

This data is important for two reasons. First, a longstanding critique from renewable energy sceptics is that increases in renewable generation only address the increase in demand and don’t replace fossil fuels — if they do that much.

The trend in the 2025 first half data needs to be confirmed but — combined with accelerating expansion of renewable capacity — it suggests we may at long last have reached a tipping point in our use of fossil fuels, the most polluting energy sources on the planet.

Second, solar and wind led renewable energy generation (5072TWh) to overtake coal generation (4896TWh) for the first time on record. Renewables’ share of total generation increased to 34.3% from 32.7%, and coal’s share fell to 33.1% from 34.2%.

Within those numbers, fossil fuel use fell in China and India and increased in the US and the EU, but by smaller amounts.

The upshot was that carbon emissions from power generation decreased slightly by 12 million tonnes, even though electricity demand increased by 2.6%.

Falls in China (-46MTCO2) and India (-24MTCO2) offset increases in the US (33 MTCO2) and the EU (13MTCO2).

“We are seeing signs of a crucial turning point,” Ember Senior Electricity Analyst Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka says in the report.

Global emissions from generation fell by 12 MTCO2, with large falls in China and India offsetting increases in the US and the EU. *Source: Ember Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights*

Supply jolt

Two things to note about this data. First, it’s still a long way from a 1.5 degrees C, Paris Agreement-aligned trajectory, or even a “well below 2 degrees C” track.

Second, this wouldn’t be possible without China’s unprecedented expansions of clean energy goods manufacturing. This is a sore point in Western markets that historically saw themselves as manufacturing powerhouses — not least the US and Europe.

But it’s also a key to the success of the energy transition.

European and US efforts to 'reshore' manufacturing of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and other clean energy goods are of recent origin relative to China’s long-term campaign to dominate these industries. So far they have yielded negligible results. The same goes for critical minerals and rare earths vital for electrification and defence goods.

China still dominates production of all of these goods, and Europe and the US have limited footholds, despite initiatives like the this week's deal for the US and Australia to expand production of critical minerals and rare earths outside China. The exception is wind turbines, due to Western developers’ preference for familiar names, but even here Western manufacturers are unable to match Chinese prices.

If the US — and to a lesser extent Europe — were willing to co-operate with China to soak up and deploy its surpluses of clean energy goods, instead of fighting against them, how much faster could the world get to net zero emissions?