Renewable Energy
For the first time on record, wind and solar together generated more of the world's electricity than coal. It's not a symbolic milestone — it's the clearest sign yet that the energy transition has stopped being a future promise and started being a present-tense fact.
For most of the last century, the story of global electricity was a story about coal. That started changing quietly around 2015, then rapidly after 2020, as the cost of solar panels and wind turbines fell faster than almost anyone predicted. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review, wind and solar's combined share of global generation crossed coal's share for the first time within the past two years — a crossover that energy analysts had, only a decade ago, pencilled in for the 2030s at the earliest.
Solar and wind didn't win because of a single breakthrough — they won because of a learning curve. Every time global manufacturing capacity for solar panels doubled, the cost per watt fell by a remarkably consistent percentage, a pattern researchers have tracked since the 1970s. Combine that with massive manufacturing investment — particularly in China, which installed more solar capacity in 2023 alone than the United States has installed in its entire history — and you get a technology that became the cheapest source of new electricity in most of the world well before most policymakers had updated their assumptions about it.
Wind followed a similar, if less dramatic, trajectory: bigger turbines, better blade materials, and offshore projects that unlocked steadier, stronger wind resources far from population centres.
Overtaking coal in generation share is a milestone, not a finish line. Coal, oil and gas combined still supply roughly 80% of global primary energy — electricity is only part of the picture, and sectors like heavy industry, aviation and shipping remain heavily fossil-fuel dependent. Intermittency is still a real engineering problem: solar and wind only generate when the sun shines and the wind blows, which means grid-scale storage, transmission upgrades and demand flexibility all have to scale up alongside the generation itself.
There's also a geographic imbalance. Much of the fastest renewable growth is concentrated in a handful of countries — China, the US, and parts of the EU — while many lower-income countries face higher financing costs for renewable projects than wealthier ones, despite often having better solar and wind resources.
The IEA's own modelling suggests renewables could supply nearly half of global electricity by the end of this decade if current build rates continue — a scenario that seemed implausible as recently as 2019. Getting there depends less on inventing new technology and more on unglamorous infrastructure: permitting reform, grid interconnection, and storage deployment at a pace that matches the speed panels and turbines are already being built.
