Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/01/renewables_generated_nearly_half_global_power/

by Growtika • 4 months ago

297 149 4 months ago

toomuchtodo12• 4 months ago

Report: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...

Ancalagon2• 4 months ago

Wait this is actually amazing, I had no idea it was that high. I can’t even believe what the US admin is doing, this is clearly the winning technology.

toomuchtodo12• 4 months ago

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...

(global solar PV deployment is just a bit below ~1TW/year at current deployment rates)

cucumber37328425• 4 months ago

Installed capacity is a misleading number. If you assessed the trucking industry by simply sum-ing the rated capacity of all the hardware you'd be rightfully laughed and and called a liar on the basis of all the times the trucks are empty and all the trucks that run out of volume before weight. Renewables is a similar situation.

Some panel in a solar farm in Canada is not gonna see the conditions that let it produce rated capacity nearly as often as one in Arizona. So the guy in Canada installs more capacity to get the same power. Meanwhile the guy in Arizona doesn't have enough copper leading out of his site to handle the power he could produce at peak on the best days, because he over-provisioned too, in order to be able to produce a given amount earlier/later in the day. The actual generation hardware is so cheap that this is just the sensible way to deploy renewables, but it makes for stupid misleading numbers.

Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.

jeffbee• 4 months ago

The Trump administration is secretly the head of a renewable energy accelerationist front, or at least that's the effect in practice.

pepperoni_pizza4• 4 months ago

The Trump administration is secretly the head of a renewable energy accelerationist front

"accelerationist" yes, not sure about the other parts.

HerbManic• 4 months ago

Trump could become an accidental environmental ally in the same way the 2008 credit crisis and Covid did. Just blunders in and in the wreckage might be something ok.

recursive• 4 months ago

Well see, we're sick of winning.

matthewdgreen2• 4 months ago

It's like watching people invest in Blockbuster Video stores after you've used Netflix.

RRWagner• 4 months ago

At the time, I stupidly thought Blockbuster would see what was coming and use their at the time larger size to pivot and do what Netflix had demonstrated would work. Kind of like when the Yellow Pages bought early Google. Oh wait...

0xbadcafebee4• 4 months ago

US is divesting from renewables because it planned to go to war with the rest of the world, which it depends on for renewables (rare earth materials). As a result it's forced to focus on oil and coal instead because it can produce that within the northwestern hemisphere. New strategic plan is likely to take over greenland, drill in arctic, expand rigs in gulf of mexico, spin up coal plants, and do deals with govt they install in Venezuela. This is the "America First" plan - reject globalism, completely control the home turf like Russia, build up warfighting apparatus, use that to go take over more countries and extract wealth there. (Guess who came up with the plan? US isn't a threat to Russia if US stays on its side of the ocean)

Rooster61• 4 months ago

Do you have sources for this? Not asking for validation reasons, I'd genuinely like to read up on this dynamic.

jaapz• 4 months ago

Build up a war fighting apparatus? They already have the strongest military in the world

Night_Thastus• 4 months ago

Makes sense - solar especially. It's just more financially smart to buy something that will generate electricity for 20-30 years with little to no maintenance than a plant that requires constant fuel, and is fairly complex mechanically with fluids and heat exchangers and turbines and so on. Panel efficiency keeps going up and prices keep going down, it's a snowball at this point.

joe_mamba• 4 months ago

it's a snowball at this point.

That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.

Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.

kibwen2• 4 months ago

China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.

Gander5739• 4 months ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3226/

testing223212• 4 months ago

We got panels on our house, and a year later I posted the results, costs, savings, etc on the community facebook page. Tons of people calling me names and saying I’m just virtue signalling.

My reply was that I spend $0, and over the next 20 years I’ll pocket $25k. Who cares about the environment with free money.

lifty2• 4 months ago

Solar capacity is always misleading because it’s intermittent. Capacity of a gas power plant can’t be compared to capacity of a solar power plant, even though it sounds like you are comparing the same thing. Would love to know total kWh generated.

adrithmetiqa• 4 months ago

Yep. The key difference is that a gas power plant can be cut off completely at any time. For example if a trigger happy leader decided to cause military mayhem in an unpredictable region supplying a large proportion of the world’s gas. The sun, however, keeps on shining.

lifty2• 4 months ago

I didn’t mean to compare them, implying that gas or anything else is better. I’m a big fan of renewables, especially solar, but just wanted to bring this aspect up. It’s confusing to me because I get excited when I see these numbers only to later deflate when I figure out the total generated kWh quantity. It would be great if there would be a “synthetic” calculation which takes into account the estimated generation and smoothing out using batteries, which would also take into account the extra cost of batteries. That would be a more apples to apples comparison both in terms of net generation and cost.

_aavaa_• 4 months ago

I understand why people are downvoting you, but we still have a bit to go before renewables make up 50% of yearly electricity generation.

Not as far as you’d think though. According to [0] in 2024 it was 6.9% solar, 8.1% wind, and 14.3% hydro, I.e. 29% renewables. Given the trajectory I wouldn’t be surprised if that total was ~33% in 2025.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

rendang• 4 months ago

By your definition/chart, we were 0% solar, 0% wind, and 20% hydro in 1985 for 20% total renewables. So, 20% -> 29% in 4 decades

tootie• 4 months ago

IEA had been predicting 2030 as peak fossil fuel usage up until recently. They revised it back upon Trump's election and shifting policy, but it's possible the Iran War has moved it forward again. Either way, it's within reach.

That being said, peak fossil fuels is the future date at which we are burning more than ever followed by the slow decrease. Meaning we are still accelerating CO2 emissions and even if we emit less, every emission is still cumulative so the march towards actually fixing the climate will only start at peak fossil fuels. We still need to remove all that GHG.

cesarvarela• 4 months ago

Sadly, my country (Uruguay) is not on that map. Right now, ~99% of the energy we get comes from renewables.

akamaka• 4 months ago

What’s the point of saying one stat is better than another, when all of them are meaningful in a different way? When renewables reach big numbers of TWh, someone will say “total generation is misleading if doesn’t line up with demand; what matters is capacity for power when we actually need it”.

richwater• 4 months ago

what matters is capacity for power when we actually need it

uh,...yea?

cbmuser2• 4 months ago

Capacity doesn’t matter, generation does.

boringg2• 4 months ago

True but having capacity allows for generation - doesn't work the other way around.

AKA the forward march of progress.

butvacuum2• 4 months ago

We can also time shift many of the things we do. Does your fridge need to run between 3-5pm in the heat of summer? or can it make sure its a little cooler to avoid running then? (trivial example, probably not a good one)

rembal• 4 months ago

I'm too lazy to double check the numbers, but as far as I remember, Germany in order to increase it's average generation by 10% had to expand capacity by 70% in solar plus wind. With stats like this, there's a thin line between progress and waste. And all this while we have nuclear. (How the world really works, Vaclav smil if anybody is less lazy than me)

mhh__2• 4 months ago

You have to massively overprovision some renewables

AnthonyMouse3• 4 months ago

True but having capacity allows for generation - doesn't work the other way around.

The issue is that comparing "capacity" as a percentage is misleading. A baseload generation source can have average generation above 90% of its rated capacity, solar at something like 25%, wind something like 25-40%. Which means that saying "nearly 50%" of capacity can imply something closer to 15% of generation, and potentially even less if the amount of local capacity is high, because then you get periods when renewable generation exceeds demand and the additional generation has nowhere to go, which effectively reduces the capacity factor even more.

And on the other side, natural gas peaker plants can have a capacity factor even lower than solar and wind because their explicit purpose is to only be used when demand exceeds supply from other sources, so that "nearly 50%" in a grid which is entirely renewables and peaker plants could actually imply more than 50% of total generation. This is much less common in existing grids but it makes looking at the nameplate capacity even more worthless because you can't just multiply it by a fixed factor to get the real number.

Whereas if they would just publish the percentage of actual generation, that's what people actually want to know. But then you'd have to say "13%" or "24%" or whatever the real number is, instead of "nearly 50%".

Manuel_D• 4 months ago

A lot of renewables have intermittent generation. If daytime electricity demand is already saturated, adding more solar panels increases capacity but doesn't increase generation (or to be more specific, it doesn't increase generation that actually fulfills demand).

epistasis• 4 months ago

Can't have generation without capacity...

ZeroGravitas2• 4 months ago

Clean generation is probably going to be 44% for 2025, up from 41% in 2024.

That's nuclear, hydro, wind and solar.

A glance at any chart showing that broken down reveals the solar and wind part to be growing at a surprising rate and the main hope for the future. There's no real limit to its growth leading to graphs like this:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/WEO24...

mentalgear• 4 months ago

This is far higher than I expected: a much needed, remarkably good reason to be cheerful about the future after all !

cucumber37328425• 4 months ago

A lot of people who are cheering right now are going to be screaming bloody murder in 10-20yr when the "below this population density generation and storage makes more sense than grid" threshold creeps up into the lower end of suburban population densities and some industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.

Energy independence is a two way street. This is essentially a domestic internal soft power lever that is going to go away or be nerf'd.

JuniperMesos• 4 months ago

Why is it bad if some industrial users of electricity buy fields around their factories and set up their own power generation there instead of hooking up to the power grid?

myrmidon3• 4 months ago

I honestly don't see a big problem with that.

First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).

Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.

lostlogin3• 4 months ago

industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.

Domestic users can just do the same. Some of us already have.

Yes, it’s not alway possible but a huge portion of domestic usage can be covered with a small install. Payback 5-10 years.

toomuchtodo12• 4 months ago

The electrical utility DTE, in Michigan, required Google to do this for their new datacenter ("Project Cannoli") to avoid increasing consumer energy prices. They are building solar and battery storage to serve the load, as it is the cheapest and fastest new generation that can be built.

I see nothing wrong with power users committing to clean energy and storage to accelerate their development plans, or to allow them at all. I am unsure who is going to complain about this model. Lease or buy as much land as you need to deploy clean energy.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-clo...

Regulatory filing: https://mi-psc.my.site.com/s/case/500cs00001amKTrAAM/in-the-...

Google’s data center operations will be served by 2.7 gigawatts (GW) of new resources for the grid, including solar power, advanced storage technologies and demand flexibility. This Clean Capacity Acceleration Agreement with DTE (the same structure as the Clean Transition Tariff) will bring new, clean resources online, while supporting the state’s transition away from coal-fired power. As part of our standard approach to building new data centers, Google will fully cover its electricity costs and infrastructure needs, helping to ensure that its growth protects local ratepayers and actively bolsters the long-term resilience of the state’s electricity grid.

philipkglass• 4 months ago

It takes time for statistical agencies to compile reports. I haven't yet found reports covering the growth in renewable generation (actual terawatt hours) for all of 2025. But this covers 3 quarters of the year:

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...

In the first three quarters of 2025, solar generation rose by 498 TWh (+31%) and already surpassed the total solar output in all of 2024. Wind generation grew by 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they added 635 TWh, outpacing the rise in global electricity demand of 603 TWh (+2.7%).

reitzensteinm• 4 months ago

Ember is an absolute treasure. Often you'll see articles on HN from places like Elektrek which are blogspam linking back to Ember's original reporting.

Their electricity data explorer is to my knowledge the most complete on the open internet.

pzo• 4 months ago

worth to keep in mind electricity usage != energy usage. We are far away from replacing oil, lpg.

marcosdumay4• 4 months ago

If you discount the inefficiencies inherent to fossil fuels, all energy usage in the world is around 3 times the electricity usage.

And we are already in the process to replace non-electricity energy.

PunchyHamster• 4 months ago

And all we got to show up for it are higher electricity prices

etiennebausson• 4 months ago

Of course, huge investment need to be paid for somehow.

Still a worthwhile investment in most case.

didgetmaster• 4 months ago

At the global level, 2025 also saw a sharp rebound in non-renewable additions, which nearly doubled compared to 2024," IRENA noted. China led that drive, with 100 GW of non-renewable capacity added last year, most of which was coal.

Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.

Is it just the need for power when the sun is not shining? Or is it something else?

danny_codes• 4 months ago

Inertia I imagine. Planning cycles can be 10, 20 years, perhaps longer for big infrastructure projects.

matthewdgreen2• 4 months ago

My understanding is that China is planning to build a coal-backed renewable grid. Renewables, including storage, will provide the majority of the electricity generation, and then coal will step in when renewables aren't available. This involves building modern coal plants that can be spun up and down as needed, and then paying them not to generate. This is why actual emissions have plateaued and dropped, even as new coal capacity comes online.

We are (or were) doing something similar in the US, just using natural gas as the fuel rather than coal.

tdb7893• 4 months ago

There's a recent AP article talking about this some (I don't know enough to know the quality of the article): https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...

marcosdumay4• 4 months ago

- They need something to provide electricity when the sun is not shining, while they install enough batteries and more than enough solar to use during the day and charge those batteries.

- They need some backup in case the Sun is dimmed for a few days, while they install enough solar to not need this anymore.

- They need some backup in case they grow too fast and the solar installations don't keep up.

- They need some backup in case there's some natural catastrophe, or some stupid dictator somewhere decides to start a war or something and destroy some vital energy infrastructure.

Their government has explained this a few times, but not on those words. It probably helps that those are government projects, and failing to deliver government projects is a very rude attitude that can end people's careers. But the rationale is sound too.

fred_is_fred3• 4 months ago

"and the solar installations don't keep up.".

Whats the average time it takes to build a solar plant versus a coal one? I would assume solar is a lot faster to first production?

decimalenough• 4 months ago

Part of China's "new" coal capacity is modern, efficient coal plants with lower emissions being built to replace old, inefficient, highly polluting ones.

Gibbon1• 4 months ago

Not trying to be offensive or throw shade, but I wouldn't be surprised if the older plants were built fast and cheap and have issues; emissions, efficiency, maintenance, safety.

Veedrac• 4 months ago

More than anything it's a supply limit. Solar is consistently scaling about as fast as any manufacturing industry scales. The TAM is just big.

0xbadcafebee4• 4 months ago

Mostly it's that solar doesn't work at night. That means you have to use batteries, which are impractical to store more than a certain amount of energy, after which you need another very large and stable energy source. So a nation-state that can't go dark must have a constant load source, such as nuclear, hydro, or coal. There's also limitations of geography, industry, production capacity, and other issues.

adev_6• 4 months ago

Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.

Because reality is very different of propagandists and lobby reports.

Currently, not a single major country right now can afford to have energy storage capacity large enough to pass, even a single day, without sun if running exclusively on solar power.

Not even China, the biggest battery provider world wide.

Considering that to get a stable and reliable grid, the needed capacity would need to supply for weeks during Dunkelflautes, this is realisitically not going to happen before multiple decades.

China has an energy problem it need to solve now: The country is developing so its electricity consumption is growing, rapidly.

Their solution is the most pragmatic on short term: Building coal plants.

Their long term solution is also the most pragmatic on long term: Using Nuclear energy to support the baseload and a mix of hydro, solar, wind for the peaks.

Leynos• 4 months ago

Wondered if you were able to suggest what might be stopping large scale build out of sodium ion and redox flow batteries?

ww520• 4 months ago

The problem is in power transmission. Transmission fee is a big part of the cost. Anything helping for at home generation should be encouraged.

Right now plug in solar is starting to appear. It is big in Germany. Utah has passed a law to cut the red tapes to allow home owners to install plug in solar themselves. More states should follow.

cptskippy• 4 months ago

The rub is that people don't want transmission networks to go away. They just don't want to pay for the maintenance.

In many US municipalities the cost of infrastructure is rolled into the per unit fee meaning high consumers pay more. This works fine until folks adopt solar and their consumption goes negative.

The right answer is a connection fee based on the cost to maintain your hookup to the grid.

chris1993• 4 months ago

As is the case in Australia. We personally pay around AU$2/day grid connect fee

JoeAltmaier2• 4 months ago

Used to be this was almost entirely explained by hydro. Not a lot of new dams going in, and they take a long time.

The solar component is usually with caveats: the majority of growth. Because growth is slow otherwise. Solar is what part of renewables now? I couldn't easily see that stat in the noise.

KylerAce• 4 months ago

50% https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-grew-almo...

JoeAltmaier2• 4 months ago

Again, that's total renewables, not solar. I believe a large part of that is hydro, decades old.

layoric• 4 months ago

Worked on the software side of increasing the rate of solar penetration in electricity networks between 2016-2020 via global solar radiation forecasting. The uptake of the software was slow the first year but then rapid once more electricity networks were struggling with knowing how much solar was in the network. Once it is easier to predict, the network becomes easier to manage, and more can be safely added, and make it economically profitable. Sucks this was a commercial operation, but excited to see all the hard work across various industries is solving problems to get more renewable energy into networks.

Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year

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