Renewables soar but fossils still reign

In 2023, the world witnessed a record-breaking expansion of renewable energy. This momentum is expected to carry on in 2024, with trillions of dollars anticipated to flow into clean energy investments.

But despite the impressive growth of renewables, fossil fuels continue to dominate, meeting the bulk of the world’s growing energy needs. This reliance on fossil fuels persists, even as clean energy scales up. This continued dependence on fossil fuels is evident in the rise of CO2 emissions from energy production, which peaked in 2023.

?These insights are drawn from the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) annual flagship report World Energy Outlook 2024 which highlights the growing tension between the rapid expansion of renewables and the enduring dominance of fossil fuels. The report shows that while momentum is building on decarbonisation, with record rollout of renewable energy and a scaling-up of EVs, we are still far from breaking the curve. Electricity consumption is now growing faster than the pace of green energy replacing fossil-fuelled generation such as coal-fired power plants. However, this is unlikely to continue.

?Forecasting that global emissions will peak by 2030, thus ushering in the ‘age of electrification', power demand is accelerating faster than anticipated while fossil fuel consumption declines faster.

The IEA finds that electricity demand has grown at twice the pace of overall energy consumption over the past decade. This surge is set to multiply sixfold by 2035, with the trend driven by electric vehicles, air conditioning, chips and the rise of advanced technologies like AI. But while clean energy is entering the energy system at an unprecedented rate, including more than 560 gigawatts (GW) of new renewables capacity added in 2023, deployment is still far from uniform across technologies and countries.

In this context, policy discussions are essential for driving widespread uptake and global alignment. As such, it remains crucial that all parties at the upcoming COP29 take forth the message that the green transition can be largely accomplished with efficiency measures and existing technologies, which are increasingly mature, widely accessible, and more affordable than ever before.

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