Low-carbon electricity sources—wind, solar, nuclear and hydropower—will meet all the world's growth in electricity demand in the next three years and bring down greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector in 2024, according to a new forecast report by the International Energy Agency.
"This would be a milestone in the pace of decarbonization," IEA Director for Energy Markets & Security Keisuke Sadamori told reporters in a briefing before the report's release Wednesday. The IEA expects global CO2 emissions from electricity generation to decrease by a little more than 2 percent in 2024. In 2023, emissions from electricity rose about 1 percent.
The IEA projects two other "major turning points" in the clean energy transition in the coming three years.
By early 2025, the IEA said, renewable sources such as wind and solar are expected to generate more than a third of the world's electricity, overtaking coal as the largest global source of power. By 2026, the IEA forecasts, the combination of renewables, hydropower and nuclear will make up almost half of the world's electricity generation.
The electricity sector is a major source of greenhouse gases causing climate change and Sadamori said it is becoming even more important as more consumer goods, services and means of transportation electrify.
"Electrification is an important pillar of the decarbonization strategy, and technologies such as electric vehicles and heat pumps are becoming increasingly popular," he said.
The independent, intergovernmental analysis and research group turns 50 years old in 2024 and produces a yearly outlook report on the world's electricity supply and demand trends. The IEA's new report outlined areas of expected growth in renewable and nuclear power amid a surge in projected demand for electricity and offered context on what the trends mean for meeting the climate challenge.
Booming Renewables
The IEA's electricity forecast echoes its recent report on renewable energy which found remarkable growth in wind and solar around the world. In 2023, renewable energy capacity grew by almost 50 percent, its fastest rate of growth in 20 years.
Brazil, Europe and the U.S. all hit record highs in renewable growth, the IEA said, but China blew past other countries, adding as much solar power in 2023 as the entire world did in 2022.
Despite this remarkable growth, Sadamori said, the world must still do more to meet the clean energy and emissions reduction targets the international community has agreed upon to avoid the most dangerous warming.
At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai last month, nearly 200 countries committed to triple the deployment of renewable energy by 2030. The IEA's analysis of existing policies shows renewable energy worldwide is on track to increase by 2.5 times its current level by 2030, just short of the tripling goal.
"So, the world needs to work hard on those issues to achieve the 2030 targets," Sadamori said. He identified a need for new transmission lines and challenges in integrating renewable energy into grid systems around the world.
Hydropower, usually a reliable source of steady, baseload power generation, suffered setbacks in 2023, the IEA reported, as drought—driven in part by climate change—lowered river levels in some regions and reduced flow through the turbines at dams. Power systems in China and India had to rely on fossil fuel generation to make up the gap, the report said.
Nuclear Comeback
By 2025, the IEA projects that nuclear power will hit a new record high worldwide. Some countries, including the U.S., are phasing out or retiring older nuclear power plants, but other countries, especially in Asia, are adding or restarting reactors. Overall, the IEA said, nuclear power will grow by about 3 percent each year through 2026.
Despite that anticipated growth, nuclear power is still a long way from meeting a newly announced ambitious goal.
Twenty countries, including the U.S., signed a pledge last month at the COP28 summit to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. That commitment would mean taking nuclear from generating roughly 10 percent of the world's electricity today to almost a third by mid-century, a tall task considering the high costs and frequent delays associated with building new reactors.
Highly regarded analyst Mycle Schneider, lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, called that pledge "completely, utterly unrealistic" in an interview last month with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Schneider said that 103 new nuclear reactors started operation worldwide since 2003 but another 110 ceased operations during that same time.
"It's simply impossible, from an industrial point of view, to put this pledge into reality," he told the Bulletin.
Powering Data
The IEA report foresees a surge in global electricity demand in the coming years driven by growth in India, China and South Asia, a manufacturing rebound in the U.S. and soaring energy needs for data centers worldwide.
The world's data centers already use up about as much power as Japan, and the report's authors said the electricity needed to power growth in artificial intelligence, data and cryptocurrency companies could double by 2026. The IEA report highlighted a few countries, including Denmark and Ireland, that already devote substantial portions of their entire electricity output just to power data processing.
The IEA called for regulations, technological improvements and increased efficiency measures to moderate the growing appetite for power from our data-driven economy.
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