The number is a record. In 2023, for the first time, 30% of the world’s electricity was produced from renewable sources, thanks to the expansion of wind and solar energy. The milestone is even more significant in the European Union, where 44% of electricity was generated from renewable sources.
This is the conclusion of the fifth edition of the Global Electricity Review report, prepared by Ember and published today. Although the most relevant of the study is the prognosis of the researchers, who are confident that a “new era” of decline in the generation of fossil energy is about to begin.
In the last two decades, renewable energies have gone from representing 19% of global electricity production (in 2000) to the current figure of 30% and, as the report concludes, it has been the growth of wind energy and solar which have driven the record.
“The future of renewable energy has arrived,” says Dave Jones, director of Ember’s Global Insights program. And solar energy, in particular, is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible.”
Also in the last two decades, solar and wind energy have grown significantly, going from 0.2% in 2000 to 12.4% last year. This expansion has been even faster in the European Union, which accounted for 17% of the global growth in solar and wind power generation in 2023.
Of these two energy sources, solar power has established itself as the main supplier of electricity growth on a global scale and, for the second year in a row, surpassed wind power in the production of new electricity. The researchers also noted that solar generated more than twice as much new electricity as coal by 2023, while maintaining its position as the world’s fastest-growing source of electricity for the ninth year in a row.
Regarding the geographical distribution, China led solar and wind generation, representing 51% and 60% respectively of the new global generation. Greece ranked second in solar electricity generation, followed by Hungary and the Netherlands. And in the specific case of Spain, the country was the eighth with the most electricity generation with solar energy and the seventh with wind power.
As a result of these changes, the group argues that the CO2 intensity of global energy generation reached a new historic low in 2023, being 12% lower than its peak in 2007. They also claim that the ‘expansion of wind and solar energy would have been sufficient to cause a decrease in the emissions of the sector during 2023, if it were not for the reduction in the generation of hydroelectric energy caused by the drought.
The report indicates that, under normal conditions, a 1.1% reduction in fossil energy generation and therefore emissions would have been achieved. However, due to the deficit in hydropower caused by the drought, coal-fired electricity generation was increased to compensate, resulting in a 1% increase in emissions from the global energy sector . To state this, they rely on the fact that almost all of the increase in coal generation last year (95%) happened in four countries that were severely affected by droughts: China, India, Vietnam and Mexico.
Ember argues in its analysis that clean electricity has helped to slow the growth of fossil fuels by almost two-thirds over the past ten years, and that the data collected gives them the “confidence” to believe that it is about to begin a new era of reduced emissions from the electricity sector. Specifically, they project a 2% reduction in fossil energy generation on a global scale by 2024, which will lead to further reductions over the following years.
The researchers add that, as a result, half of the world’s economies are at least five years beyond their fossil energy peak. In the specific case of the European Union, emissions from the electricity sector would have reached their peak in 2007 and would have decreased by 46% since then.
In this sense, the decrease in coal production that the European Union has made in the last ten years is considered important; which has been the second largest, behind the United States.
At COP28, world leaders agreed to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030, meaning that by that date 60% of the world’s electricity should come from renewable sources. This would almost halve emissions from the electricity sector and would be in line with the climate objective of 1.5°C.
However, the report warns that in order to achieve these international climate change goals, the energy sector should be the first to decarbonize; and that the decrease in emissions will be conditioned by the speed with which the expansion of clean energy continues.
