Renewable energy will this year shrink fossil fuels’ reigning share of the global electricity market for the first time.
That is the key finding of Ember, a leading energy think tank based in London, which on Wednesday published its first comprehensive Global Electricity Review analysing data from 215 countries.
Thanks to the galloping pace of new solar and wind capacity, renewables have been claiming almost all growth in electricity demand for five years, leaving fossil fuels stagnant.
But this year, said Ember, they will also roll back fossil fuels’ market share by 2 percent – the beginning of a decade-long process of knocking them out of electricity production altogether in three dozen developed economies.
Renewables expanded by an average of 3.5 percent a year during the past decade, compared with an annual 1.5 percent in the previous decade, as prices for photovoltaic panels and wind turbines climbed down and their productivity soared.
Ember found that the world already produced a record 30 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources last year.
For one thing, installed capacity underperformed because of light winds and droughts that hobbled hydroelectricity production – conditions that are not expected to continue.
“There’s a specific tipping point for 2023 itself,” Jones told Al Jazeera. “The buildout in solar generation only really happened towards the end of the year and it will only be in 2024 that we’ll see the full force of that buildout reflected in generation.”
In addition to the full-year effect of newly installed capacity, Jones believed a 50 percent collapse of solar panel prices in the final months of 2023 will also lead to record new installations.
Ember estimates that as a result, renewable generation this year will add a gargantuan 1,221 terawatt hours of electricity supply, compared with 513 TWh added last year.
“What’s going to happen in 2024 is going to be a next-level renewables boom, which means that for the first time, [the] fossils generation will start falling,” said Jones.
That means trouble for coal-fired power stations, but it could also mean trouble for natural gas, he said.
“There’s going to be a bit of a rude awakening on gas,” said Jones. “The gas industry before were really looking forward to coal collapsing because that was going to create a new market for them but actually … wind and solar is replacing coal and it’s replacing gas.”
Ember’s prediction relies on hydroelectric power recovering from five years of drought, and nuclear power continuing to provide just over 9 percent of the global mix.
Europe, which leads the world in clean energy production, could theoretically have progressed even faster if Germany had not decided to shut down its nuclear power plants after Japan’s Fukushima accident in 2011, said Trevelyan Wing, a fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, focusing on energy matters.
But the same forces that shut down nuclear also boosted renewables, he told Al Jazeera.
“The energy transition that’s happening in Germany is in large part because of the anti-nuclear movement. [It] helped launch the citizen energy movement, which has installed solar and wind farms, biogas plants, and really made possible the near-exponential expansion of renewable energy there.”
Last year it created about 29 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, twice those of the runner-up – the United States.
But it also installed half the world’s solar panels and 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines, easily rating as the green energy transition leader. It manufactures as much as 85 percent of the solar panels the rest of the world installs.
It is also a leader in the electrification of transport and heating, two of the most polluting sectors of the economy after electricity production. Last year it put more electric vehicles on the road and heat pumps into homes than the rest of the world combined, and was responsible for almost all new electricity demand.
Ember applauds this, saying, “China’s need to find new export markets is a tremendous opportunity for countries around the world to take advantage of how cost-competitive and available solar is compared to other generation sources.”