Despite what's happening in the USA, renewables are winning globally

Summary

Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Grist. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you live in the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking that renewable energy is on the outs. In July, Congress voted to rapidly phase out longstanding tax credit support for wind and solar power, and the Trump administration has taken seemingly every step in its power to halt the development of individual wind and solar projects—even as domestic electricity demand rises and new sources of electricity become more important than ever. But even as clean energy deployment hit roadblocks in the United States, the world overall set a new record for renewable energy investment over the first half of this year. Wind and solar power are meeting and even exceeding a global rise in energy demand. Indeed, electricity output from these sources is increasing faster than the world can use it, displacing some fossil fuel-generated power in the process. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by Ember, a global energy think tank, which mapped this year’s global power supply by analyzing monthly data from 88 countries that are responsible for more than 90 percent of global electricity demand. “Overall—we’re talking globally—renewables overtook coal,” said Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember and a co-author of the company’s report. “And I expect this to hold.” This year marks the first time that renewable energy sources have outpowered coal in the global energy mix. In fact, global use of fossil fuels for electricity actually declined slightly, compared to the same period in 2024. Another report published this week by the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental energy research and policy organization, projects that the quantity of installed renewable power—meaning the maximum amount of energy that can be produced by systems like solar fields, hydroelectric dams, and wind turbines—will more than doubl...