Renewable energy sources generated more electricity than coal worldwide in 2025, reaching 34 percent of global supply and ending more than a century of coal’s dominance in power generation. The International Energy Agency confirmed the shift in its Global Energy Review 2026, while the energy think tank Ember reported the same crossover independently. The result landed years earlier than many grid planners expected, driven by wind and solar additions that outpaced total electricity demand growth.
How renewables overtook coal and why the timing caught up fast
The crossover did not happen because electricity demand fell. Global generation continued to climb in 2025, pulled higher by industrial electrification, data centers, and growing cooling loads in warmer regions. Renewables overtook coal because new wind and solar capacity added more terawatt-hours to the grid than the entire increase in worldwide electricity consumption. That arithmetic left coal, and fossil fuels more broadly, losing market share even as absolute demand rose.
The IEA had anticipated this shift. Its mid-2025 forecast projected that renewables would surpass coal sometime in the mid-2020s, based on the pace of solar panel installations in China, India, and Europe and the continued buildout of onshore wind. The actual result arrived at the early end of that window. Renewables’ share of global electricity generation climbed from 32 percent in 2024 to 34 percent in 2025, according to the IEA’s full-year accounting of electricity supply.
That two-percentage-point jump in a single year reflects the compounding effect of capacity additions. Solar farms and wind turbines installed in prior years keep producing, so each new wave of construction stacks on top of existing output. Coal plants, by contrast, faced flat or declining utilization rates in most markets outside South and Southeast Asia. The net effect was a structural squeeze: renewables grew into the space that coal could not defend.
Another factor was the maturing cost advantage of wind and solar. In many regions, new renewable projects now undercut the operating costs of existing coal plants. That dynamic encouraged utilities to run coal units less often, reserving them for peak or seasonal demand, while leaning more heavily on renewables whenever they were available. As grids integrated more utility-scale batteries and flexible gas capacity, system operators gained confidence that they could maintain reliability even as coal’s share shrank.
IEA and Ember data on the 2025 electricity split
Two independent tracking efforts reached similar conclusions about 2025, though their precise language differs. The IEA’s Global Energy Review 2026 stated that renewables “nearly matched” coal generation, framing the result as approximate parity. Ember, cited by Bloomberg, went further and declared that renewables “topped coal in the global power mix” for the first time in more than 100 years. The gap between “nearly matched” and “topped” is narrow but real, and it likely reflects differences in how each organization categorizes certain generation sources and rounds final numbers.
The IEA’s underlying data can be checked directly. Its global dataset covers world aggregates for 2023 through 2025, allowing independent analysts and newsrooms to reproduce the electricity mix calculations. That transparency matters because the 34 percent figure and the coal comparison both rest on how analysts classify hydropower, biomass, and waste-to-energy alongside wind and solar.
IEA statisticians group wind, solar, hydro, bioenergy, geothermal, and some waste-to-energy facilities under the broad heading of renewables, while keeping nuclear and fossil fuels in separate categories. Ember’s methodology is broadly similar but may treat some niche technologies differently or apply alternative regional estimates where official data are delayed. Small discrepancies in how off-grid solar, industrial biomass, or mixed-fuel plants are counted can nudge each side of the coal–renewables balance by a few tenths of a percentage point.
The IEA’s key findings place the electricity crossover within a broader energy-system context, noting that low-carbon sources overall grew faster than demand in 2025, pushing fossil generation into decline as a share of the total. That framing suggests the coal displacement was not an isolated statistical quirk but part of a wider pattern in which clean power is absorbing most incremental demand. In other words, each additional unit of electricity the world needed in 2025 was more likely to come from a wind farm or solar array than from a new coal unit.
Ember’s interpretation, emphasizing that renewables “topped” coal, underscores the symbolic weight of the moment. Coal has been the backbone of industrial power systems since the early 20th century; seeing it overtaken, even by a slim margin, signals to markets and policymakers that the center of gravity in electricity is shifting decisively toward cleaner sources.
Gaps in the evidence and what to watch through 2027
Several pieces of the story remain incomplete. The IEA’s “nearly matched” language and Ember’s “topped” conclusion have not been fully reconciled in public data releases. Readers and analysts tracking this milestone should look for Ember’s full Global Electricity Review methodology tables, which would clarify whether the think tank’s share calculations include the same basket of renewable sources as the IEA’s. Bloomberg’s reporting on Ember’s findings provides a summary but not the raw data files needed for independent verification.
Regional drivers also need closer examination. China’s solar buildout was the single largest contributor to global renewable additions in recent years, but English-language primary records from Chinese research institutions, including Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment, and Economy, do not yet provide granular 2025 generation breakdowns that outside analysts can cross-check. Without that detail, the global aggregate is solid at the top line but harder to decompose by country.
At the same time, hydropower output in key regions has been affected by drought and changing precipitation patterns. In years when hydro underperforms, wind and solar must grow even faster to maintain or expand renewables’ overall share. The 2025 crossover therefore depended not only on how much new capacity came online, but also on how existing dams and legacy plants performed relative to historical averages.
The hypothesis that renewables added more annual terawatt-hours than total demand growth in 2025 is consistent with the IEA’s reported share gains. If that pattern holds in 2026 and 2027, coal retirements will accelerate even in high-demand regions that have historically relied on coal baseload power. India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are the markets to watch. Each faces rising electricity consumption from industrialization and urbanization, and each has significant coal fleets still operating. Whether new renewable capacity in those countries grows fast enough to repeat the global pattern at a national level will determine how quickly the 2025 crossover translates into actual plant closures.
Policy choices will heavily influence that trajectory. Clear auction pipelines for wind and solar, timely grid connections, and streamlined land permitting can all help sustain the pace of renewable additions. Conversely, subsidies for domestic coal mining, capacity payments that favor inflexible plants, or delays in transmission expansion could slow the shift, even if renewables remain cost-competitive on paper.
For energy investors, utility planners, and policymakers, the immediate practical step is straightforward: reassess any coal-dependent generation portfolio against a baseline in which renewables already rival coal globally and are poised to grow further. That means stress-testing business models under scenarios where coal utilization factors fall, carbon policies tighten, and capital markets increasingly scrutinize exposure to high-emissions assets. The 2025 data do not guarantee a smooth or uniform transition, but they do mark a turning point: for the first time in modern history, the default expectation for new electricity supply is more likely to be renewable than coal-fired.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
