Something changed in the world during 2025 and many people still haven’t heard about it. For the first time in more than a century, solar panels, windmills, and hydroelectric dams together produced more electricity than coal-fired power plants. It’s not a technical anecdote.
It is the first clear indication that the energy transition is moving from promises to deeds, with direct consequences for the climate and for our health.
A headline that seems small and is not
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
Imagine that your grandfather was born at a time when almost every light bulb on the planet was lit by burning coal. Imagine that your parents grew up like this, that you grew up like this, and that your children also began to live like this. Well, that world ceased to exist last year.
The British think tank Ember published its annual Global Electricity Review 2026 report on April 21, and the numbers are overwhelming.
Renewables generated 10,730 terawatt hours of electricity in 2025, equivalent to 33.8 percent of the global total.
Coal stood at 10,476 terawatt hours, up 33 percent.
The difference is narrow, but enough to overthrow a hegemony of a hundred years.
To give you an idea, a terawatt hour is what a city of about 200,000 inhabitants consumes for a whole year. Multiply that by more than ten thousand.
That’s the electricity the planet produced last year without burning coal.
Why this happened right now
Aditya Lolla, one of the authors of the report, explains it with a phrase that has gone viral in energy circles. We have entered, he says, “the era of clean growth”. What he means is something concrete and new. Until now, every time the world needed more electricity, the logical thing to do was to build a gas or coal-fired power plant. It was cheap, fast, safe. In 2025 that logic was broken.
Electricity demand grew by 2.8 percent, mainly due to electric cars, factories that are electrified and the huge data centers that move artificial intelligence.
Well, 99 percent of that extra demand was covered by clean energy. Generation with fossil fuels even fell a little, by 0.2 percent. It is only the fifth time in this century that this has happened, and the first since the covid pandemic.
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, celebrated it at the climate summit in Belém with a clear idea. Fossil fuels, he said, belong to the past. Renewables are the engine of prosperity in the 21st century.
The sun, the true hero of the story
If there is one protagonist to point out, it is solar energy. Its numbers are dizzying. Photovoltaic generation grew by 30 percent in a single year, reaching 2,778 terawatt hours.
Solar panels alone covered 75 percent of the increase in global demand. It is as if all the electricity consumed by the entire European Union came out of the sun, and there was still plenty of it.
Why does everyone suddenly want solar panels?
The answer is not romantic. Fatih Birol, director of the International Energy Agency, put it bluntly.
85 percent of the new power plants being built this year in the world are renewable, and it’s not for the love of the planet.
It’s because they’re cheaper. Solar modules cost 90 percent less today than they did ten years ago, and batteries became cheaper another 45 percent in 2025 alone. When something becomes so cheap, the market chooses it without the need for speeches.
China and India, the giants that change sides
The most surprising thing about the report comes when you look at the map. China, the country that for years was synonymous with smoking coal plants, installed 378 gigawatts of solar panels by 2025.
In a few months, they installed the equivalent of 100 panels per second. And, for the first time since 2015, their consumption of coal for electricity dropped.
India did something similar. It added a record 38 gigawatts of solar power and also reduced, for the first time this century, coal-fired electricity. That the two Asian giants, the ones that need energy the most, the ones that were burning coal the most, are going down at the same time is something that analysts describe as unprecedented.
In Europe, wind and sun together outnumbered all fossil fuels combined, generating 30.1 percent of electricity. Ireland stopped burning coal in June, Finland did so in April. The United States is the uncomfortable exception. After the exit from the Paris Agreement and cuts to renewable aid, coal has rebounded there and electricity emissions rose by 4.3 percent in the first half of the year.
What this means for the air we breathe
This is where history stops being a chronicle of numbers to touch anyone’s life. Emissions from the global electricity sector fell by around 0.9 percent in 2025.
It seems little, but it is the first drop since the pandemic, and it means that some 230 million tons of CO₂ were avoided. To be understood, it is as if the entire electricity system of the entire Africa had stopped polluting from one day to the next.
The other side of the coin is health.
The medical journal The Lancet published its annual report on climate and health in October, and the data hits. Air pollution from fossil fuels kills 2.5 million people worldwide every year. And the fall in coal prices has already prevented, according to estimates, some 160,000 deaths per year between 2010 and 2022. In China, where the air in cities such as Beijing was for years unbreathable, the fine particles that do the most damage to the lungs have been reduced by more than 50 percent since 2013.
Jeremy Farrar, number two at the World Health Organization, sums it up like this. The climate crisis, he says, is also a health crisis. And phasing out fossil fuels is the most powerful lever we have to slow warming and save lives at the same time.
The party is not over
It would be a mistake to close this article with champagne. Global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels broke a new record in 2025, 38,100 million tonnes, driven mainly by oil and gas. Pierre Friedlingstein, from the University of Exeter, says something that hurts to read. Keeping warming below 1.5 degrees, he warns, is no longer plausible.
Guterres himself acknowledged in Belém that this threshold will be exceeded, at the latest, at the beginning of the next decade.
In addition, the commitment signed at COP28 to triple renewable capacity to 11,200 gigawatts by 2030 is still a long way off. By the end of 2025, 5,149 gigawatts had been installed, and national plans only cover half of the missing jump.
The World Resources Institute was even tougher in its State of Climate Action 2025 report. None of the 45 indicators it assesses, not a single one, is going at the necessary pace.
There are other brakes. Some 3,000 gigawatts of renewable projects are waiting in line to connect to old electricity grids. Europe wasted more than 7,200 million euros in 2024 to manage these bottlenecks. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Poland and South Africa are still very much hooked on coal. And data centers for artificial intelligence are going to double their electricity consumption by 2030, which may slow down all the good things that are happening.
What is clear
The overtaking of coal-fired renewables is not the end of anything. It is, rather, the first proof on a planetary scale that the energy system can change without sinking the economy. The question is no longer whether the transition is possible. It is, and it is also cheap. The real question is whether it will arrive on time. And that depends less on technology, which has already won its game, than on electricity grids, batteries and the political will to accelerate.
In summary, in 2025 renewables surpassed coal in global electricity production for the first time in a hundred years, according to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026 report. Solar led the change with 30 percent growth. China and India reduced their coal consumption at the same time, something unprecedented. Emissions from the electricity sector fell by 0.9 percent. The transition is no longer a promise, but it is still not enough.
