Renewable electricity generation to surpass coal next year – IEA

The IEA forecasts global electricity demand will grow by around 4% in both 2024 and 2025 — a growth rate higher than any year since 2007 — and up from the 2.5% seen in 2023. 

Intense heatwaves in the first half of this year were exacerbated by global heating caused by the burning fossil fuels and became a “significant driver” of rising electricity demand due to increasing use of air conditioning, the IEA reported in its Electricity Mid-Year Update. 

As demand rises, the IEA forecasts that the portion of the world’s electricity generated by renewable energy sources such as wind would grow this year and next, with their share of global electricity forecast to rise from 30% in 2023 to 35% in 2025. 

Solar power will meet around half of the growth in global electricity demand over 2024 and 2025, the IEA forecasts, with solar and wind combined contributing up to three quarters of the forecast growth through 2025. 

Meanwhile, wind and solar combined will exceed hydropower’s contribution to electricity generation in 2024, the report predicts. 

Thanks to the large growth in renewable electricity generation, it will surpass coal’s contribution by 2025, underlining its growing importance around the world, the IEA forecasts.

However, the IEA does not expect global power generation from coal to fall this year due to strong demand, particularly in the major industrial economies of China and India. 

“In 2024, the massive gains in wind and solar generation globally, combined with the recovery in hydropower in China, constrained the increases in electricity output from fossil fuels. As a result, we expect CO₂ emissions to remain relatively flat, up about 0.5%,” the report reads. 

Its executive summary adds: “Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from the global power sector are plateauing, with a slight increase in 2024 followed by a decline in 2025.” 

The findings of the report were welcomed by energy think tank Ember. 

“We’re heading fast towards an electric future, with so much of the rise in energy demand coming from electricity,” Dave Jones, the group’s insight director, said. 

“Renewable electricity has a dual role – not only to replace coal and gas power plants – but also to meet this rise in electricity demand. Therefore, we need to be building renewables at double speed, to make power sector emissions fall as fast as they need to.”