More than 40% of the world’s electricity was generated by zero-carbon technologies last year, but the notable shift away from fossil fuels was slowed by rising energy demand.
Solar and wind accounted for 17% of global power supply in 2023, hydroelectric and nuclear power contributed 24%, while fossil fuels like coal and natural gas produced 57%, a BloombergNEF (BNEF) report found.
“We’ve consistently seen the penetration of renewables rising every year, and this year we hit quite a few milestones that had felt harder to reach in past years,” Meredith Annex, head of clean power at BNEF, told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
She added that the findings highlight growing momentum in the renewables sector driven largely by a surge in investment, particularly in solar, which has accounted for over 90% of the new electricity capacity added since 2022.
Birgitte Ringstad Vartdal, CEO of Europe-based renewable energy generation company Statkraft, is predicting that fossil fuel-generated electricity will be phased out within two decades, Energy Watch reports. The change will be driven by market forces responding to falling renewable energy costs.
“Whatever scenario we look at, even in a scenario where there is less focus on climate, where there is less politics, market forces will bring more renewable energy into the system,” Vartdal said.
But national climate commitments still fall short of what is needed to hold global warming below the 1.5°C threshold outlined by the Paris Agreement, WSJ reports. With 2024’s global renewables investments roughly at par with 2023 levels, countries are far behind the 1.6-fold investment increase that will be needed to triple global capacity by 2030, as countries promised at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai.
Annex said continuing steady growth will not be enough to get to net-zero, making the second half of this year a “defining moment” for the investment landscape.
While steady growth is “definitely a positive” and could be a sign that the industry is reaching a new kind of status quo, “we need to help expand even faster if we’re going to be in line with net-zero,” she said.
At the same time, rapid expansion of renewable energy generation will not be enough to scale back emissions if it is matched by rising energy demand, as it has been. As chemical engineer Robert Rapier recently wrote in Forbes, overall energy demand has outpaced renewables growth in nine of the ten past years. The only exception was 2020, with the onset of the COVID pandemic.
“If renewable energy isn’t keeping up with or even substantially gaining on overall energy demand growth, then other energy sources have to make up the deficit,” Rapier writes. “That has meant that fossil fuel growth—and subsequently global carbon dioxide emissions—continue to rise.”
This played out recently in the United States, where a nearly one-third increase in electricity generation from utility-scale solar during the first half of this year, compared to the same period last year, was undermined by high energy demand “met in large part by an increase in generation from fossil fuels,” writes Inside Climate News.
According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, utility-scale power plants generated 2.1 million gigawatt-hours (GWh) from January to June. This amounted to a 5% increase compared to 2023, the highest percentage increase in decades for that time of year.
Utility-scale solar plants accounted for 102,615 GWh, a 30% increase compared to the same half of the year before, and offshore and onshore wind farms generated 247,434 GWh, an increase of 8%. Data also show that most new power plants under construction in the U.S. are renewable.
But generation from natural gas plants also increased 5%, to 857,023 GWh, and coal generation grew by 1%, to 303,027 GWh.
“The numbers tell a story of a country moving in the right direction, but not nearly fast enough,” Inside Climate says.
