In 2025, coal surrendered its crown. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, renewable energy surpassed coal as the world's dominant electricity source — a threshold that scientists, policymakers and engineers have been building toward for more than fifty years.
This milestone matters because it signals a fundamental reshaping of how human civilization powers itself. The coal furnaces and steam engines that lit the early Industrial Revolution left a legacy that shadowed the world for centuries. Despite the rise of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, coal remained the single most dominant global energy source until now. Solar and wind together account for most of renewable energy's surging electricity generation, with hydropower and other technologies adding meaningful contributions. But it has been the explosive growth of solar — driven by bold policy shifts and voracious global demand for affordable photovoltaic panels produced at scale — that pushed renewables into the lead.
To honor the three people most instrumental in this transformation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) awarded the Mani L. Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award to Charlie Gay, co-founder of the Greenstar Foundation; Hans-Josef Fell, president of Energy Watch Group; and Li Junfeng, standing director of the China Energy Research Society. Combined, these three pioneers bring more than a century of experience championing renewable energy across government, private enterprise, policy and economic development.
Gay began his career in solar research in the 1970s, helping to advance panel design by adapting low-cost screen printing techniques and manufacturing approaches borrowed from the automotive industry. He later directed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) from 1994 to 1997, then led the Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office from 2016 to 2019. Throughout his career, he has served on startups, advisory boards, and industry councils.
The achievement was anything but inevitable. Well into the 1990s, photovoltaic cells were prohibitively expensive, with no guarantee that a mass market for public and private use would ever emerge. The U.S. began installing PV cells on satellites in the late 1950s, but the path from invention to global dominance required deliberate collaboration across borders. Germany pioneered crucial policy mechanisms for market formation. China made transformative breakthroughs in manufacturing and process improvements that substantially reduced costs. The U.S. provided early public investment through NASA, NREL and other agencies.
Mani L. Bhaumik, a physicist who contributed to the development of high-powered lasers, established the award in 2022 with an $11.4 million pledge — the largest in AAAS's history. The annual $250,000 prize recognizes researchers whose work underpins Science journal's Breakthrough of the Year. Bhaumik emphasized that the award celebrates not just technological invention, but the ability to achieve "unparalleled global impact."
As Robert Margolis, a former senior energy analyst at NREL and committee member, noted: "It's taken on the order of 50 years to go from invention to a real market." Each winner demonstrated long-term commitment to technology development while fostering advances in manufacturing and policy — the combination that made this historic transition possible. For the first time in over two centuries, humanity's electricity now flows from the sun and wind rather than the mines and wells of the fossil fuel era.