Renewables provided a record 30% of the world's energy needs in 2023, according to Ember, an independent climate think tank tracking global energy sources and consumption since 2000. While aggressive wind and solar policies have enabled regions like Brazil, China, and the Netherlands to quickly shift their grids toward cleaner energy sources, large-scale wind and solar farm deployments have helped some of the world's largest economies reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and coal. The think tank estimates that at this rate, countries with net zero carbon emissions goals for their power grids—like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—could meet those goals by 2035.
Published Wednesday, Ember's Global Electricity Review 2024 incorporates energy source and consumption data from 80 countries. The organization obtains this data from the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy, the Energy Information Administration, Eurostat, and 70 country-specific agencies responsible for updating their statistics monthly. While country-specific sources aren't always perfect—different countries use different methodologies, and a given country might feel incentivized to make its grid appear cleaner than it is—Ember reportedly checks each dataset against another from a different source to ensure accuracy. The result is a wide yet high-resolution picture of at least 94% of the world's energy grid.
According to the report, there are now 33 countries that fulfill at least 10% of their energy demand with solar power, including Chile, Australia, and the Netherlands. (California, one of the world's largest economies, gets 28% of its energy from solar.) This is said to be a natural progression of Wright's law, which states that technology gets cheaper as it's deployed more and vice versa. Solar panels are cheaper to make and install today than in 2010, enabling the cumulative global solar capacity to double every three years since then. That said, 60% of the solar capacity added in 2023 was in China, and 14% was added in Europe. These regions receive little sunlight compared with regions optimized for solar, causing 2023 solar generation to fall short of projections by 182 terawatt hours (TWh) despite the source's overall growth.
Wind is also a major contributor to renewable energy's increased share, with China accounting for 60% of new global wind generation in 2023. The source is estimated to have provided 7.8% of global electricity last year. Together with solar, nuclear power, and hydropower, wind helped nearly 40% of the world's electricity come from clean sources in 2023.
"The world is now at a turning point where solar and wind not only slow emissions growth, but actually start to push fossil generation into decline," the researchers write.
Ember points out that the expansion of wind and solar would have helped reduce global power sector emissions in 2023, if not for a drought that caused hydropower output to fall. China, India, Vietnam, and Mexico were each affected by particularly dry weather last year, forcing each country to compensate with coal by anywhere from 5.9% to 42%. This means global power sector emissions increased by 1%. Ember expects emissions to fall this year, barring the continuation of unusually arid weather; should these regions face a long-term lack of precipitation, new wind and solar might be required to pick up the slack coal would otherwise continue to take on.
Global energy demand is also bound to grow, which means renewables will need to grow with it. Not only is Earth becoming more populated, but power-hungry data centers are an increasingly prevalent part of our infrastructure, and more technologies (like vehicles) are moving toward electricity over gas. More people are using air conditioning, too, as the planet warms and the equipment becomes more accessible. Ember estimates that we're at the start of a "new era" of global electricity demand growth, with demand expected to outpace global GDP growth (3.4% versus 3.1%).
