Updated September 2026.
It’s easy to write about “a brighter tomorrow” in vague terms. It’s more useful to look at what is actually happening. The global energy system is changing faster than almost anyone predicted ten years ago, and the numbers from 2025 were a genuine turning point.
2025: renewables overtook coal
According to the energy think tank Ember:
- Renewables passed coal. Solar, wind, hydro and other renewables produced 33.8% of the world’s electricity in 2025, against 33.0% for coal. It was the first time renewables had outproduced coal in about a century.
- Solar led the growth. Its output rose 30% in a single year, and it met about three-quarters of the world’s increase in electricity demand.
- Clean power covered all the new demand. Solar and wind together supplied almost all of the growth in electricity use, so power from fossil fuels didn’t grow.
Why it happened
Mostly price. Solar panels and batteries have become dramatically cheaper through mass production, much of it in China. In most of the world, a new solar or wind farm is now the cheapest way to add electricity. Pairing it with batteries lets that power be used after dark. Countries adding the most solar, including China, India, Pakistan, and many in Africa and the Middle East, are often doing it because it is cheap, not only because it is clean.
What stands in the way
- Emissions are still rising overall. Record fossil fuel use in 2025 pushed global CO₂ emissions to a new high. Electricity is only part of the story. Transport, heating, steel, cement and farming are harder to clean up.
- Grids are the bottleneck. In the US alone, about 2,000 gigawatts of proposed projects were waiting to connect to the grid at the end of 2025.
- Demand is rising again, driven by data centers, air conditioning and electrified vehicles and heating.
- Politics. Policy support varies sharply between countries and can reverse. The US ended its household solar tax credit in 2025.
A realistic hopeful view
The optimiztic case no longer rests on hope alone. Clean electricity is now cheap, it is being built at record speed, and it has started to push fossil fuels out of the power sector. The unfinished work is getting that cheap clean power into everything else, and building the lines to carry it. That is where the next decade will be won or lost.
Further reading: What’s Driving Climate Change? The Main Views and the Evidence and The Changing Geopolitics of Renewables.
