For the first time, renewable energy has overtaken coal as the primary source of electricity around the world, a new report says, indicating a shift in the global reliance on environmentally harmful fossil fuels.
Renewable electricity use rose to 34.3% of global consumption in the first half of 2025, while coal's use fell to 33.1%, the energy think tank Ember found. Renewable energies include sources like solar, wind and hydro, as opposed to fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.
Populous developing countries like China and India led the charge in making the switch to renewable energies, Ember reports. Meanwhile, Western societies including the European Union and the United States increased their consumption of coal during this period.
Nevertheless, global coal generation fell 0.6% in the first half compared to the same period a year earlier.
"I think that most economies want to expand their clean electricity, but some are more strategic and seizing on the opportunity than others," said Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember.
Wiatros-Motyka said China has been particularly clever in decreasing its reliance on fossil fuels. She noted that such a shift gives countries more autonomy since they can reduce their dependence on energy imports from other nations.
"There has been more investment in infrastructure that facilitates clean growth [in emerging economies] than in many advanced economies," she said. "This is probably about some countries missing the opportunities, and maybe they don't realize it, but that's what it is."
Countries including Hungary, Pakistan and Australia set records in solar energy production, generating 20% or more of their electricity from solar power.
The report found that global carbon dioxide emissions fell slightly in the first half of the year as solar and wind power "exceeded demand growth and led to a slight fall in fossil fuel use."
China has been the largest driver in the move to renewable energy sources, accounting for 55% of global solar generation growth. The United States' share, by contrast, was just 14%. Renewables might slow as the Trump administration moves to sharply reduce clean-energy development.
While the world — including the United States — is making significant gains in making energy cleaner, increased demand leaves renewables struggling to meet consumer needs, said Daniel Cohan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.
The tech race to integrate artificial intelligence into daily life is in part to blame.
"This has really been an inflection point for the United States in that power demand in the U.S. had flatlined for a couple decades, and with the growth of data centers, and AI and crypto, and with other growth from industries and air conditioning, and so on, we're starting to see electricity demand grow 3% per year, rather than be flat or 1%," Cohan said.
Cohan said that most of the new power plants in the United States and abroad utilize wind, solar and batteries but that now those plants are being put to the test.
"It's a question of whether this wind and solar that we're adding is able to keep pace with the demand growth because if wind and solar don't grow fast enough, that means that we have to keep running the gas and coal power plants that we already have a little bit harder than we did before," he said.
While it is ultimately cheaper and cleaner to rely on wind and the sun for power once the plants are operational, Cohan said funding the infrastructure for renewables remains a hurdle.
China and other countries have been able to succeed because they foresaw a rising desire for renewable energy and invested heavily in those alternatives.
"China took technologies that were originally developed in the United States back in Bell Labs in the 1950s and figured out how to scale them up, and just relentlessly year after year make them cheaper and cheaper and slightly better performing each time to the point that the cost of solar panels has fallen by well over 90% and the cheapest solar panels in the world are being manufactured in China," Cohan said.
As far as the sustainability of humanity's energy consumption, Cohan said, the world is on the verge of making noticeable gains in protecting the environment from fossil fuel use.
"Wind and solar are finally growing fast enough that not only do they offset some of the demand growth, but they actually offset more than 100% of the demand growth," he said.
"That's the tipping point at which we can start to see fossil fuel use decline," Cohan said.
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