Clean Energy Surpasses Growth in Global Electricity Demand for First Time Since COVID-19

Clean energy met 100% of global electricity demand growth in 2025 for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Global Electricity Review 2026 by Ember, a U.K.-based energy think tank.

The report reveals that solar and battery technologies are transforming the global power system, increasingly outperforming gas and coal in some of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

Key Insights from Ember’s Report

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, host Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap News, spoke with Nicholas Fulghum, lead author of the report and energy and climate data analyst at Ember. Their discussion covered the record-breaking growth of solar energy, shifts in India’s energy development, and potential impacts of the Iran War on this year’s energy trends.

Why Solar Is Dominating the Energy Transition

“It’s not just the absolute growth there. It’s also the speed of growth that we’re not really expecting from sources in the past. Usually, when a source scales to this level, where you have a maturing technology that is dominating parts of the market, the growth rates come down. But with solar, what we’ve seen is that 2025 had the highest growth rate—30%—that we’ve seen in eight years. And that’s quite unusual for something that’s really reached scale.”

— Nicholas Fulghum, Ember

“The solar story as a whole is essentially a story of technology, and the learning curve that solar has been on hasn’t really stopped. We’re still seeing cost declines, and they are really accelerating deployment further. If you think about where the cost has come from, we have a decline of about 90% over the last decade. It really just completely changes the use cases and where solar is applicable.”

— Nicholas Fulghum, Ember

Global Solar Deployment Trends

Fulghum highlighted the versatility of solar energy, noting its rapid adoption across diverse contexts:

• Utility-scale installations in the U.S.
• Hybrid systems in Australia and Germany, combining utility-scale and distributed solar
• Grassroots deployment in countries like Pakistan

“This versatility is not something that is applicable to any other electricity source—not just now, but in history,” Fulghum said.

Podcast Highlights and Where to Listen

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer and available on major platforms, including:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Amazon Music

Listeners can also subscribe via the show’s RSS feed for direct updates.

Additional Resources

For further details, refer to:

• Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026