In a milestone that energy researchers have been awaiting for over a hundred years, the world in 2025 generated more electricity from renewables than from coal. Solar alone became the single biggest source meeting humanity's growing appetite for electricity. And for the first time since the steam engine reshaped industry, all of the surge in global electricity demand was met without burning a single additional lump of fossil fuel.
The findings come from two landmark reports released this week by the International Energy Agency and the think tank Ember, and they suggest the world has quietly crossed a threshold that scientists and policymakers have long spoken about but rarely witnessed: the beginning of a structural shift away from coal in power generation.
"This was a year when the economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily — and still all that demand growth was met with renewables," said Daan Walter, a lead researcher at Ember. The distinction matters because, historically, plateaus in fossil fuel use have coincided with economic downturns. In 2025, global economic growth was normal, meaning renewable energy appears to be displacing coal on its own merits rather than through recession-driven conservation.
Much of the momentum came from an unlikely pair: China and India, the world's two most populous nations that together account for 42 percent of global fossil power generation. Both countries saw electricity from fossil fuels decline in the same year for the first time this century, as they raced to build out solar, wind, and battery infrastructure at unprecedented speed. The cost of batteries alone fell 45 percent in 2025, an even steeper drop than the 20 percent decline tracked the year before.
Developing nations are not merely following the developed world's lead anymore. In Indonesia, electric vehicles now comprise more than 15 percent of new car sales — a larger share than in the United States — up from virtually zero in the early 2020s. Many Indonesian drivers are "leapfrogging" gasoline cars altogether, purchasing an EV as their first vehicle.
The picture is not uniformly bright. When measured across the entire energy economy — including jets, cargo ships, and the internal combustion engines still powering most cars — fossil fuel use has not yet sustained a meaningful decline. Global CO₂ emissions reached a record high last year, rising 0.4 percent. But the pace of that increase is slowing, and analysts say the conditions for faster decarbonization are now more firmly in place than at any prior point in the clean energy era.
"The energy transition was conceived as something that is led by the developed world, and the developing world kind of hobbles after at a slower pace," Walter said. "We're now…" He left the sentence unfinished, but the data behind it suggests a different story entirely.