If you live in the US, you could be forgiven for thinking that renewable energy is on the decline. In July, Congress voted for quickly end long-standing support for tax credits wind and solar energy, and the Trump administration has seemingly taken every step possible to stop the development of individual energy. wind And solar projects – even how domestic demand for electricity is growing and new sources of electricity are becoming more important than ever.
But even as clean energy adoption faces hurdles in the U.S., the world as a whole has established new record for investment in renewable energy for the first half of this year. Wind and solar energy are meeting and even exceeding global energy demand growth. Indeed, electricity production from these sources is growing faster than the world can use it, displacing some of the energy generated from fossil fuels. This is according to report published Tuesday by Ember, a global energy think tank that mapped global energy supplies this year by analyzing monthly data from 88 countries that account for more than 90 percent of global electricity demand.
“Overall—we're talking globally—renewables have overtaken coal,” said Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, senior energy analyst at Ember and co-author of the company's report. “And I expect that to continue.” This year it is celebrated first time that renewable energy has surpassed coal in the global energy mix. Actually, global use of fossil fuels for electricity production has actually fallen slightlycompared to the same period in 2024.
Another report A publication released this week by the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental energy research and policy organization, projects that the amount of installed renewable energy – that is, the maximum amount of energy that can be produced by systems such as solar fields, hydroelectric dams and wind turbines – will increase by more than doubled. National policies are encouraging the development of green technologies, as well as the astonishing decline in the price of solar energy – primarily thanks to Chinese manufacturers who are building more 80 percent of the world's solar energy components — are largely the driving force behind the transition.
And even this forecast may be conservative.
“Over the past few decades, the IEA has consistently underestimated how quickly renewable energy is growing,” said Robert Brecha, senior climate and energy adviser at Climate Analytics, a global climate science and policy institute who was not involved in either the Ember report or the IEA report. “I see no reason to believe that renewable energy will not double by 2030.”
The vast majority of renewable energy forecast to come online in the coming years will come from solar power, which has already met more than 80 percent of new global energy demand in the first six months of 2025, according to the Ember report. In China, the world's largest emerging renewable energy market, and India, which is on track to become the second largest, strong growth in solar power production is responsible for the historic global decline in coal-fired power.
However, in the US and European Union, fossil fuel production rose in the first half of this year. In Europe, poor wind conditions and drought, rather than government policies, negatively impacted the bloc's wind and hydropower production, leading to a 14 percent increase in gas-fired power production. On the other side of the Atlantic, U.S. coal-fired power generation rose 17 percent.
The outlook for U.S. renewable energy policy is so bleak that the IEA has lowered its growth expectations for the country's renewable energy capacity by 50 percent from last year's projections. This U.S.-driven decline cuts the agency's global renewable energy growth forecasts by 5 percent. Overall, however, the IEA still expects renewable energy capacity to grow even faster between 2025 and 2030 than between 2020 and 2025.
“They can slow down the process; they could do a lot more damage than I thought,” Brecha said, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to slow the growth of renewable energy. “But they can't stop it.”
