A third of the world’s electricity is now renewable

Renewable sources generated 33.5% of the world’s electricity in 2025². That figure is from Ember, an energy research group that compiles national electricity data, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) rounds its own count to 34%⁷. Carried forward along the IEA’s forecast, the share today is about 36.11%.

Of every 100 units of electricity the world made that year, about 34 came from sources that don’t run out: 14 from hydropower, 9 from solar panels, 8 from wind, 2 from burning wood and other plant material (known as bioenergy), and under 1 from geothermal heat and the tides. The other 66 came from coal (33), gas (22), nuclear power (9) and other fossil fuels (3)². Nuclear is not counted as renewable⁴.

That is a third of electricity, not of energy. Electricity is only about a fifth of the energy the world uses, so renewable power comes to about 7% of the total³.

For most of this century the share hardly moved. It was 18.7% in 2000 and 22.9% in 2015, and it has added more than ten percentage points in the ten years since².

Hydropower is still the largest renewable source, but wind and solar are catching up

Hydropower produces the most renewable electricity: 13.9% of the world’s total in 2025, ahead of solar at 8.8% and wind at 8.5%².

Wind and solar are growing far faster. Together they made 4.5% of the world’s electricity in 2015 and 17.3% in 2025, and they now generate more than half of all renewable power²⁴. Solar alone is set to pass hydropower: the IEA expects it to reach about 15% of the world’s electricity by 2030⁸, against 14% for hydropower⁶.

Hydropower has stalled by comparison. The world has built 43% more of it since 2010 and gets only 29% more electricity from it, because output depends on rainfall, and its share of world electricity is at an all-time low⁴. Two decades ago hydropower supplied more than 80% of renewable electricity. The IEA expects 30% by 2030⁶.

Cost is what changed. Since 2010 the cost of electricity from new solar farms has fallen by 89% and from onshore wind farms by 71%. In 2025 more than 90% of large new renewable projects produced power more cheaply than the cheapest new fossil-fuelled plant, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)¹⁷.

Renewables passed coal in 2025, narrowly

Renewables generated more electricity than coal in 2025 for the first time in a century: 33.5% of the world’s total against 33.2%, by Ember’s count². The last time was 1919, when the world used nearly 300 times less electricity and almost all the renewable part was hydropower⁴.

The margin is thin enough that the answer depends on definitions. The IEA counts the gases given off by coke ovens and blast furnaces as coal⁹, and Ember files them under other fossil fuels⁵. On the IEA’s basis renewables virtually matched coal in 2025⁷ and are expected to pull ahead in 2026⁹.

Region by region the picture is clearer. Renewables are ahead of coal everywhere except Asia, where coal makes 52% of electricity and renewables 32%⁴.

Renewables are half the world’s power capacity, but make a third of its electricity

Renewables made up about half of the world’s generating capacity at the end of 2025, by our own division of Ember’s figures, but a third of the electricity actually generated. Capacity is what power plants could produce running flat out. Solar shows the gap most clearly: 23% of capacity and 8.8% of generation².

Wind and sun don’t allow running flat out. Over a year a new solar farm generates about 16.5% of what it would at full power around the clock, the equivalent of four hours a day, and a new onshore wind farm about 36%¹⁷. That’s why headlines about record installations run ahead of the share. The IEA expects renewable capacity to double by 2030 while renewable generation grows 60%⁶.

The other reason is that the share is a fraction, and the total it is measured against keeps growing. World electricity demand rose 3% in 2025 and the IEA expects 3.6% a year to 2030⁸. In 2025 renewables supplied more than 99% of that growth, and the share still rose by less than two percentage points².

Electricity is only a fifth of the energy the world uses

Renewables supplied 18.0% of all the energy the world used in 2023, the latest year counted¹⁴, and renewable electricity only about 7%³. Of the 18 points, about 7 are renewable electricity and nearly 10 are heat, half of that the wood, charcoal and dung that households burn for cooking and heating. Just over 1 point is biofuel in transport³.

The gap between a third and 7% has a simple cause. Electricity is only about a fifth of the energy people use, 21% by the IEA’s count⁸. Of every 100 units of energy the world uses, about 21 arrive as electricity, and 7 of those are renewable.

The rest is mostly heat and transport, and both still run on fossil fuels. Heat for buildings and industry is almost half of the energy the world uses, and more than three quarters of it comes from burning coal, gas and oil¹⁴. Transport is about a third, by our division of the same report’s figures¹⁴, and it runs 90% on oil¹¹.

These are harder to switch than a power station. In heavy industry almost two thirds of the energy goes on heat above 400 °C, and ships and aircraft are hard to run on electricity¹¹. Transport was 4.3% renewable in 2023, up from 2.9% ten years earlier, and nearly nine tenths of that was biofuel¹⁴. The IEA expects renewables to go from 14% to 18% of heat and from 4% to 6% of transport by 2030⁶.

The way round is to move heat and transport onto the grid, and that has begun. The IEA expects electricity to rise from 21% to 24% of the energy people use by 2030⁸. Electric machines also waste less: electric cars are two to four times as efficient as their fossil-fuelled alternatives and heat pumps three to five times¹¹, so each unit of clean electricity replaces several units of fuel.

Norway gets 99% of its electricity from renewables, Saudi Arabia 4%

The highest shares belong to countries with big rivers. Paraguay, Ethiopia and Iceland generate essentially all of their electricity from renewable sources, Norway 99% and Brazil 87%².

That dependence has a cost. Hydropower output follows the rain⁴, and Brazil’s renewable share fell from 83% to 77% between 2020 and 2021, with fossil-fuelled generation rising by nearly half to fill the gap².

Among the largest economies the range is wide².

The countries at the bottom have barely started. Wind and solar make under 1% of Russia’s electricity, and fossil fuels still make more than two thirds of Japan’s⁴.

China moves the world figure more than any other country. It generates more than a third of the world’s renewable electricity and, by our division of Ember’s data, supplied about 60% of the world’s growth in renewable electricity in 2025².

Burning wood counts as renewable, and nuclear power does not

Bioenergy, which supplies 2% of the world’s electricity, is counted as renewable because national laws and targets count it that way. Without it the renewable share would be about 31.5%. Ember notes that bioenergy’s carbon emissions over its whole life cycle are significantly higher than those of other renewables⁴.

Some scientists go further. A 2018 paper in the journal Nature Communications argued that burning genuine wood waste helps the climate, but that harvesting extra wood just to burn it “is likely to increase carbon in the atmosphere for decades to centuries”¹⁹.

Nuclear power is the reverse case. It is low-carbon but not renewable, so its 8.8% of world electricity is left out of the renewable share. With nuclear added, 42.3% of the world’s electricity in 2025 came from clean sources².

A rising renewable share has not yet cut fossil power

The renewable share has climbed for a decade, and the amount of electricity made from fossil fuels has climbed with it. Coal, gas and oil still made 57.7% of the world’s electricity in 2025. Fossil-fuelled generation was 15% higher than in 2015, and the power sector’s greenhouse gas emissions were 14% higher².

Most of that rise happened in one country. China accounted for more than four fifths of the world’s increase in fossil-fuelled generation over the past decade, and outside China fossil generation has not grown since 2018⁴.

In 2025 both fossil generation and emissions stayed almost exactly level². That is progress of a kind, since renewables covered the whole year’s growth in demand, but they have not yet begun to shrink what was already there. The article on whether solar is replacing coal looks at when that might start.

43% of electricity by 2030, if the grids can keep up

The IEA forecasts that renewables will generate 43% of the world’s electricity in 2030⁶. That is its expectation from current policies and market trends, not a target.

The last forecast that can be checked was too cautious: in 2019 the IEA expected 30% by 2024¹⁸, and by its own count the figure turned out to be 32%⁶. The current one has moved the other way. In 2025 the IEA trimmed its outlook for new renewable capacity by 5%⁶.

So far 2026 is close to course. The share for January to August was 35.4%, up from 33.9% in the same months of 2025¹. (Part-year figures run above the full year, because the share swings from about 32% in January to about 38% in May.) That is a rise of about 1.5 percentage points, a little slower than the 1.9 a year the forecast needs.

What could slow it is everything around the panels and turbines. More than 2,500 gigawatts of projects are waiting for a grid connection worldwide, a queue that includes batteries and large new consumers such as data centres as well as wind and solar farms⁸. For scale, that is about a quarter of the capacity of every power plant in the world. Where the grid cannot take the power it is thrown away, which is called curtailment, and Chile curtailed 15% of its wind and solar output in 2024⁶.

Policy matters too. In 2025 the IEA cut its forecast for renewable growth in the United States by almost 50%⁶.

Even 43% is well short of what climate targets assume: IRENA’s pathway for holding warming to 1.5 °C needs 68% by 2030¹⁴. Capacity tells the same story. Countries pledged at the COP28 climate summit to triple renewable capacity by 2030 from its 2022 level, and the IEA expects 2.6 times⁶.

Money is still pulling both ways. Governments spent $725 billion on direct subsidies for fossil fuels in 2024¹⁶, more than the roughly $665 billion a year the world now invests in renewable power plants¹⁵.

If the share kept rising at the 1.9 points a year the forecast implies, a rough extrapolation rather than a forecast, renewables would pass half of the world’s electricity around 2034. The IEA’s own scenarios put the share at 49% to 53% in 2035¹¹.

Even at 43%, with electricity at 24% of the energy people use, renewable power would be about 10% of all energy in 2030. That is our arithmetic from two IEA forecasts, not a figure either report prints. The share of electricity can climb quickly while the share of all energy crawls. The other pages on energy count what the rest is made of.