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How is clean electricity doing globally?
In this episode, I dig into the just-released Global Electricity Review from the think tank Ember, with founder Bryony Worthington and lead author Nicolas Fulghum. Clean electricity surpassed 40 percent of global generation in 2024, driven by record solar deployment. We explore solar's rapid doubling, the pace of demand growth, and the way China's clean energy decisions shape global trends.
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David Roberts
Okay, hello everyone, this is Volts for April 9th, 2025, "How is clean electricity doing globally?" I'm your host, David Roberts. Every year for six years now, the UK-based energy think tank Ember has released a Global Electricity Review, which gathers data from every country around the world to show who is generating electricity, where, from what sources, and how those numbers have changed year over year.
It's a great way to check and make sure that your sense of industry trends is rooted in data. And speaking of data, Ember also makes their dataset public so that anyone else can use it for their own analysis.
Very cool. Anyway, the Global Electricity Review for 2025 is out. So, what's happening? What are the trends? How fast is clean energy growing? Why is coal still hanging on? Is gas growing or shrinking in the power sector? And how do we make sense of what's happening in China?
To discuss a little bit of all of this, I have with me today Bryony Worthington, Ember's founder and director, and Nicolas Fulghum, a lead author on this year's review. We're going to talk all about what the data says and what it suggests may happen next.
With no further ado, Bryony Worthington, Nicolas Fulghum, welcome to Volts. Thank you for coming.
Bryony Worthington
Thank you, David. Good to be on here.
Nicolas Fulghum
Thanks for having us.
David Roberts
Lots to discuss in the specifics, but I thought before we jumped in, maybe Bryony, you could just give us a little bit of background about the data. We're data nerds around here; we love some data. And just tell us a little bit about how you gather this dataset. Is anyone else, to your knowledge, assembling all this information in one place?
Bryony Worthington
Well, actually, to be fair, I think Nick is better placed to actually discuss how the data is gathered because I take a bit more of a kind of high-level view. But I can certainly explain. Ember's ethos is that we want to be the leading source of open data with full transparency that helps people understand what's actually happening in the electricity system. And as you said, the data is made completely public so people can interrogate it themselves. But we also provide our own interpretation for people in these very accessible Global Electricity Reports, which we've been doing for a number of years.
And, as you say, the latest one is out for 2024, and it's a compilation of the electricity data of virtually all the countries in the world. It certainly makes up a huge percentage of the amount of electricity. But, Nick can tell you more precisely where that data comes from and exactly what the coverage is.
David Roberts
I know, in your big developed countries, obviously, this stuff is public and published, but I'm sure there are some countries where it's more difficult than others. How difficult is it to get all this data in one place?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, there are essentially two challenges that we're coming up against. So, as you said, a lot of advanced economies, the EU, the US, they all publish this data pretty frequently. It's all up to date, sometimes up to the hour. And the challenge there is that they all love to publish their data in different formats. So, one of the big tasks that we have is bringing this together into a coherent format so that when we're saying, "Oh, solar generation did this, coal generation did this," that we're actually talking about the same things. And then, yeah, you already identified the second problem, and it's global coverage.
But for these reports, we try to go as deep as possible and as wide as possible. So, in this year's review, we have 2024 data for 88 countries, and that covers about 93% of global electricity demand. So, that really gives us a good view of the trends in the global power sector as a whole.
David Roberts
And so, I guess there are just some countries that are, I imagine, they're small, but they just are opaque. There's just no way to pull data out.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, oftentimes, we just can't give a direct look at what happened in the last few months or the last year for a few of those countries. So, we might be talking about countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, where data reporting just isn't up to the same standard yet. But those countries are making progress as well. I mean, over the years, we've certainly added more and more to our coverage, and our expectation is very much that this will get better as systems in those countries catch up as well. But it's a big task. Luckily, there's a big community of these organizations as well.
So, we're all working with other organizations in the field that do similar work. But we're glad to always be among the first to put a really detailed dataset out there that other people can really dig into as well.
David Roberts
Let's talk a little bit about what we found this year. So, the headline of the report is that low carbon sources, by which we mean renewables plus nuclear, have now reached 40.9% of the world's total electricity generation — which I think, you know, I just want to pause on. I feel like a lot of people out there in the public still have the sense that clean energy is marginal, you know, nibbling away on the margins, still a long way off. 40% is not small. 40% is like almost halfway there. I think that's just kind of a bracing headline.
How fast is that headline number rising? Is that creeping up or is that starting to get on an S-curve too?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, we're talking about a very, very long-term trend and a short-term trend here. So the very long-term trend, to put this 40% into perspective that we've crossed again, is the last time this happened wasn't 20 years ago or 30 years ago. It was in the 1940s. So back then, it was basically coal and hydropower. And that's the last time we've had 40% low carbon power. And the trend had been sort of wobbling along over the years, recently dipping down as more and more electricity was met by coal in emerging economies in China and India.
And the short-term trend that is really turning this around now is wind and solar. So, in the last 10 years, more slowly at the beginning, but now faster and faster, we see wind and solar coming online really at scale. And that's what's pushed low carbon power back up to these levels that we haven't seen for nearly a century.
David Roberts
So would you venture a guess on what that'll be like next year or two years from now? Like a percent a year? Or are we going to start jumping faster than that?
Nicolas Fulghum
I mean, luckily, we're starting to jump on the faster side of that. So there's a good chance that we'll get about 1 to 2% a year. And then as we go closer to 2030, we'll certainly approach 50% as well, which luckily will give us a lovely headline for one of these iterations of the report.
David Roberts
Yeah, look forward to that one. All right, so I just sort of structured our conversation around the three big megatrends that are identified in the report. One is solar: booming. Hard to miss that one. The second is electricity demand growth. And the third is what are China and India doing? So, I want to talk about all those. Let's start with solar. So, the cool thing that I had not realized, you know, everybody's seen, I think, the kind of Moore's Law or whatever they call it for solar, the cost curve of the cost of solar coming down in a very kind of regular and predictable way.
But what I had not realized is that deployment is doubling on a relatively regular schedule. Talk a little bit about that, like where solar is relative to last year and the year before.
Bryony Worthington
Can I just put that in context? So, as Nick said, you know, there's been this long-term slug of clean power that's been there since the 40s, which is made up of hydropower and nuclear, and you know, they've made up like 25. It's varied, but pretty steady. But what we've seen is this now massive surge in wind and solar in recent years. And the statistic that really stands out for me is that, you know, it took a couple of decades for terawatt hours to reach, you know, 1 terawatt hour of solar and it hit there in 2022, but then it only took two more years for it to hit the next terawatt hour.
So, it doubled in two years. That's where you're starting to see the S-curve of solar starting to impact. And now, Solar's up at 7% of global electricity and it's rising fast and it's a really fast technology to deploy. So, that's where you're going to see the growth.
David Roberts
One of the interesting charts is, it sort of shows once an electricity source hits 100 terawatts, how long until it hits 1,000 and then 2,000. And solar looks to me as the fastest source ever by that measure.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, it's a really lovely little chart, and it shows wind and the speed of wind and solar, but also interestingly shows the speed of nuclear. Right, that wasn't a rapid rise over a couple of decades as well. So yeah, full of interesting charts like that.
David Roberts
Nick, maybe this is for you. To what extent are your solar numbers capturing distributed solar?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, it's a really good question and one that we spend a lot of time on. So, with solar more so than with other sources like you mentioned, you have a problem that there is not just your utility scale, large hydro dams, large coal plants, you do have those distributed systems that sit on rooftops that are installed by businesses, you know, private individuals. And not all of those are a) registered and b) feed data anywhere. But, countries have gotten better at estimating the generation and reporting on this. And then on top of that, we do some additional work to try to estimate what's behind this.
So, there are countries where if you look on the surface and sort of the government reported data, you might not see a large change. But then if you dig a little bit deeper, and Pakistan is the big example that's made the rounds in the energy industry a little bit in recent months where there's a huge influx of businesses and individuals installing solar power without really any government involvement. And yeah, it's really important that we capture this growth as well. And we've captured as much as possible. So all of the numbers in here, we estimate as much of that missing generation as possible.
But if anything, we think that the solar growth that we're describing is probably still a slight underestimate.
David Roberts
You think there's probably just more distributed sneaking out there than you can get a grip on? Because I did a pod on the Pakistan phenomenon, which is really quite remarkable. And basically, they're measuring it by the level of imports, which is not a perfect one-to-one way to measure, but at least they have a handle on how much is coming into the country.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, I mean, in reality, rooftop solar, embedded solar shows up as negative demand usually. So as long as you're not kind of double counting, if you're missing stuff, it's probably showing up in your demand curve. Your curve is softer than it would be otherwise. But what Nick's describing is quite an intricate process of making sure that we're trying to estimate what's out there and then not double counting. So, taking into account, you'd have to add that onto your growth as well and your demand.
David Roberts
Speaking of distributed and speaking of China, you know, one of the things we learned from that Pakistan pod is that China is in the midst of a sort of multi-year overproduction of solar. This massive production is massively out ahead of demand, which is creating a glut, which is creating these incredibly cheap panels which are then — you know, like we're, and I think the EU are tariffing the heck out of them. But like Pakistan isn't, Saudi Arabia isn't and they're just like absorbing all that at a huge rate. So I wonder how much of this leap in solar power that we saw in the last couple of years — because it's really striking, the graph of solar deployment really jumps up in 2023 and 2024 — how much of that is Chinese overcapacity? A temporary thing that is going to work itself out versus structural growth?
Bryony Worthington
I mean, China is not just producing solar panels for export, it's also deploying them at scale domestically. So, the growth of clean energy in China accounts for more than half of the global increase.
David Roberts
Yes, we're going to return to that.
Bryony Worthington
Yes, but your point about their effect on their neighbors is huge. Right. The fact that they've brought the cost down to such a degree now that Pakistan can take those imports and use it to get to a place where they're innovating, new businesses are being formed, they're training, their skills are growing. As your podcast covered, it's kind of a win-win. China gets to increase its balance of trade and Pakistan is starting to develop a whole new industry around this very cheap technology. So that's happening across Southeast Asia, but as you say, Pakistan is one of the most noticeable.
David Roberts
And Nick, is that going to — is China going to rein that in? Are the numbers going to ever go down or do we expect this is all just going to keep moving in one direction?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, I mean, historically, if I had to bet on one of the two options, I would definitely bet on it continuing to move upwards.
David Roberts
So that's a pretty safe bet so far.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah. Historically, there have been estimates by various organizations that have generally every year predicted, "Oh, this is kind of the year where the S-curve goes the other way." And it's just really not happened yet. And every single time, it goes the other way. Just kind of to put that into perspective, usually when we have technological advancements, so when we're talking about an industry really emerging because of underlying technological changes, what you expect is that as it reaches scale, you not only see the growth kind of stabilize, but you see the growth rates coming down. So your percentage increase every year usually comes down. With solar, we've seen such consistent growth. So it's doubling every three years very consistently for the last 15, 16 years.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's just wild to me. This is one of these regularities we find in the data that it's just like magic. Like, why is that happening? What is the structure of the universe that is somehow manifesting in this very regular two-year doubling cycle that is so regular, it's been going on for 15 years. It's just weird that it's so predictable, I guess. I don't totally wrap my head around it.
Nicolas Fulghum
Especially because it's driven by all of these parallel and sometimes crossing, both political and technological developments. And it kind of results in the same thing.
David Roberts
Right. It's somehow averaging out to the exact same number year after year. It's crazy.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, and 2024 is kind of extra special here because we saw this huge jump in manufacturing of solar panels, in installations of solar panels, solar generation. But if you just look at the solar generation number, the increase was 29% compared to the previous year. And that's the highest growth rate we've seen in six years.
David Roberts
Right. So, the growth rate is accelerating, not falling.
Nicolas Fulghum
Exactly. And that's not really something you typically see when technologies reach sort of this global economy-changing scale, that you still have these growth rates that you'd usually associate with a technology that's in an earlier development cycle.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, there really is something genuinely miraculous about what is going on with solar. It sort of defies some of it, defies rational analysis.
Bryony Worthington
Isn't it symptomatic of the fact that electricity is ubiquitous? We need it for everything. And if you have the ability to put in small scale, well, any scale, right? That's the thing: it's scalable, but it's modular. And so the manufacturing process, we're talking of an era now of manufactured electricity rather than fuel-based electricity, which just means it's a completely different game. And that's, I mean, it's delightful to see, but it's much more similar to an electronics boom or some other aspect of modernity than, you know, just an energy story.
David Roberts
Yeah, the way I tell that story is like with fossil fuels, you have two contrasting forces. You have technology pushing the price down, but then you have scarcity pushing the price up. Right. It gets harder and harder to find new deposits. But with renewables, it's only the former, not the latter. Right. It's only going down. It's only technology costs and it's only going in one direction.
Nicolas Fulghum
I wanted to add one point on the question of, you could call it reliance on China for the manufacturing side, does that mean it's going to go down at some point?
David Roberts
That's my question.
Nicolas Fulghum
We have a lot of overcapacity relative to what's being installed even, so there's still a lot of headroom even if manufacturing capacity doesn't expand at the same rate. And on the other side, we don't just see this trend in China or in countries that buy solar panels from China. So, the US has a very similar recent acceleration of solar deployment and is historically very allergic to imports of Chinese solar panels. So, it's a technology-driven transition and that's not something that can be reversed by an individual government, really. That technology exists and it's out there and it's being built.
David Roberts
Good note, good note at the moment. One really cool thing is, as we noted, cheap solar flooding into a lot of these emerging economies. This sort of harkens me back to a hype cycle I remember from earlier in my career about emerging economies leapfrogging. Right. There's all this talk about, you know, just like phones, they never did landlines, they skipped straight to cell phones. They're going to skip giant heavy fossil fuel power infrastructure and skip straight to clean energy. That talk kind of faded away for a while, but now is it back?
Is the dream of leapfrogging real because of cheap solar? How big of an effect do you think all this cheap solar is going to have on these new solar markets?
Bryony Worthington
I would say the leapfrogging is happening in many sectors, and it all leads back to China ultimately. But you've got, not just solar, you've got batteries and you've got electric vehicles. And what's super interesting is watching what happens in Southeast Asia, Africa, and India in relation to transport. Right. In Europe and the US, we've always thought, "Well, first you decarbonize your electricity and then you do transport." They're doing it the other way around. They're just like, "Okay, we don't have access to cheap oil or reliable oil. We want to decarbonize transport first." So the leapfrog in transport is really exciting and happening in ways that the European and perhaps North American commentators didn't see coming.
Because it's all two- and three-wheeler vehicles that are electrifying.
David Roberts
It's not cars.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, not cars. It's and cars. That's the thing. It's everything.
David Roberts
It's fascinating to see that come back. As you mentioned, you can't really talk about solar these days without talking about batteries. Battery installations are, I mean, they appear to be on the same S-curve. Like there was enough installed in 2024 to almost, almost double total global capacity. So like storage is, you know, if solar is doubling every three years, storage is coming close to doubling almost every year. So, is there any reason not to think that batteries are just on that same S-curve as solar? Like, are there any troubled seas ahead or should we just expect batteries to get cheap fast, just like solar did, or even cheaper faster, as far as I can tell?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, I think we're very much in the cheaper, faster side of things here. So, what's slightly different to solar power is that solar was really competing with an existing market. So, in the early days of solar, you had these very government-focused programs that made sure that these technologies are really taking off. So, Germany kind of, I mean, in retrospect, you could say sacrificed part of its transition early on to really popularize solar power and deploy a lot more than any other country on a per capita basis.
David Roberts
And gets nothing but grief for it. So, let's just pause here and say, "Thank you, Germany."
Nicolas Fulghum
I should disclose that I'm also German, so that is probably part of my grief here. So, there was a competition with an existing entire electricity sector that was producing, you know, historically relatively low prices if you look at gas, etc., which is no longer the case. Whereas batteries are coming into this with a very clear task. They have a very clear use case. They're economically already viable at this point. Obviously, there is a technology trajectory here as well. So, we've seen battery installations really since 2014, but that's only, in the grand scheme of things, that's really only 10 years ago.
And now we're hitting scale where, on a utility scale level, batteries are really making a difference. The number that we have in the report that is really, I think, drawing us out the best is that in California, which is one of the US states with the fastest battery storage deployment, you now have very regularly 20% — and in the more recent month, actually over 20% of the evening peak — so when there's a lot of electricity being used, it is being met by batteries.
David Roberts
Yes, this is the duck curve. We conquered the duck curve and we didn't properly celebrate it. Everybody was freaked out about that duck curve not very long ago, three or four years ago.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, and the predictions for the sort of doom cycle of more solar and it would ruin it were all predictions out to 2030 and were not involving a lot of battery deployment. And now the numbers are far beyond what commentators would have expected even two or three years ago. So we're really on an almost faster trajectory than we've seen with solar because the use case is just so apparent and the economics are very much on the side of batteries.
David Roberts
And I think a cool thing about batteries, and I suppose this is true of power generation too, but especially for batteries, the cheaper they get, it's not just that they have that obvious use case you're talking about. The cheaper they get, the more use cases there are. Like, it just turns out there's all kinds of things you can do with batteries that just wouldn't have occurred to people earlier because they were too expensive. I think they're going to — like the different ways people are going to use batteries in the future, I think is going to be mind-blowing.
Bryony Worthington
And also, the range of types of batteries will start to expand as well. The sort of lithium-ion story is fascinating because it actually kind of emerged out of the mobile phone and laptop kind of boom that meant that we could crack these battery types. And then electric vehicles come along and start to scale and then bring the cost down and then suddenly it's starting to play this really important role, balancing. But there may be lots of other forms of storage that we might use. Or indeed, we might see more interconnection and more transmission.
So now that we've reached this kind of 40% clean, of which 15% is variable, is wind and solar, there's going to be this growing market in balancing the grid and moving electrons around both in time and space, which is a hugely big growth market.
David Roberts
Yeah. Here's a very big and difficult-to-answer question for both of you. I mean, a lot of people going back decades, people would say, "The grid can only handle X percent of variable energy, solar and wind." And of course, that X percent has crept up and crept up and crept up. People were woefully wrong about that early on, but people still make those predictions. You know, it's like 30%, 40%, maybe it's 60%. Do you anticipate variability actually slowing deployment at some point? Like, do you think these balancing technologies are going to be a choke point that is going to slow things down?
Bryony Worthington
I mean, Nick, if you've got some data on who's got the highest penetration of variable renewables, that would be super interesting. I don't know off the top of my head, but I do know that there are certain European countries who, you know, are really into the high percentages. But I guess the answer to the question is "it depends." You can get to high percentages if you've got an interconnected market and lots of reliable transmission. And the more diverse your transmission connections are, the more secure you are. So in Europe, it's been really possible. It's not the same in Southeast Asia where most countries, they struggle to have a grid, let alone interconnected grids into different markets.
So, it may well be slower there, but that might just drive more innovation into using electrons in other ways and storing electrons in other ways. So, I think there are scenarios which — geography is a big determinant and infrastructure is a big determinant, but human innovation, if you have cheap power and you want access to it, I think I wouldn't bet against that winning out.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, like Bryony says, on the European side, we do have these markets specifically that have a lot of wind power that have pushed a share higher and higher. So, Denmark is close to the 70% mark now, but obviously very interconnected. If you're talking solar, which obviously is a very steady kind of day-night cycle, we have Greece and Hungary in Europe which are leading. Hungary is actually very close to or at a quarter. So, 25%.
David Roberts
No kidding? In Hungary, I had no idea. Who knew?
Nicolas Fulghum
And these are really fast transitions. So, it happens over two to three years. Brazil is one of those that has just exploded onto the scene as a clean power leader over the last sort of three to five years, is in the top five for solar generation in the world now, and is one of those examples where the rest of the power system, even though it's interconnected to its neighbors, but not on a large scale like a lot of European countries are, but there are other ways to integrate huge amounts of solar. So, they're at 10% solar now.
There's a lot of headroom there still to grow, and that's the case for a lot of countries. China still isn't at 10%, so there's still a lot of room. But Brazil, for example, has a lot of reservoir hydropower.
David Roberts
Right, hydro.
Nicolas Fulghum
And what reservoir hydro specifically allows you to do is, you can choose to run it, it's dispatchable, you can choose not to run it when there's a lot of solar on the grid and you basically use your reservoir hydro as a battery, so to speak. You just hold back some of that generation for a time period where either you might be in a situation where there's a drought, you can even compensate for that by having more wind and solar. So, there's a lot of complementary ways in which you can integrate a lot more wind and solar into the grid. And we're nowhere near the point where we're maxing out that deployment.
And as other technologies like batteries come in, as we're deploying more, that threshold where it becomes really difficult is also moving up. And if anything, the last few years have shown us that that threshold might be moving up faster than we could catch up.
David Roberts
Yes, this has always been my prediction, but people used to point and laugh when I said that 20 years ago, but that was true. I always think that that number is always going to be on the horizon.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, just to round out the US situation as well, I should say — a plug for Ember's reports. It doesn't just produce a global report, it does a European deep dive, and this year did the first deep dive into the USA. And there, two states have got more than 30% penetration from solar, and that's California and Nevada, but there's a whole lot of other states that got similar geography and similar access to solar resources that could catch up. So it's really quite a remarkable story everywhere.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. Again, solar miracle. Quickly, on the supply thing, before we get to it, I want to talk about demand. But on wind, you know, solar is such a fun, good story. So gratifying in so many ways. Like the line just moves in one direction, has for decades now. It's just nothing but good news out of that sector. But wind lately has been kind of like flailing around a little bit, up and down. You know, if you squint from a distance, you could imagine it hitting a plateau. Are wind's current troubles structural? Is there some reason it's not going to continue moving up?
Or do we think these are temporary headwinds that wind is facing? Pardon the pun, I guess.
Nicolas Fulghum
I mean, there's definitely some temporary headwinds, but it's maybe accidentally showing up in generation data. So, wind power was still the second largest growing source of any power source in 2024. So, it's a lot more than coal and gas still. So, what happened this year is basically a condition story. It was less windy than it was in 2023. And as your stock of wind power grows, conditions can actually make a difference. So, if globally your wind conditions are just 2% worse, then you lose 2% of your entire stock. But that's not necessarily an issue. Like, we see bigger swings in other sources of power as well.
What really matters are those underlying installations, and they are still really strong. China had a new record for wind capacity installations. The EU has a legislative agenda and reality on the ground that is very much pointing to larger installations in the coming years as well. So, we're still in a good place. There are some headwinds to pick up on that in the US, obviously. I mean, there's very strong rhetoric from the administration that there shouldn't be any wind turbines going up. You have some echoing on the other side of the Atlantic where politicians in the right wing are even suggesting tearing wind turbines down.
I mean, a lot of this is rhetoric. There's no economic viability to any of this, and constituencies wouldn't really go along with that. As much as some constituencies are sometimes against building wind turbines, once they exist, people hate it a lot more when that cheap power disappears.
David Roberts
People hate change. So, once the thing is built, tearing it down is the change. Right. So, big picture wise, you don't see any kind of plateauing happening, broadly speaking, with wind? You think wind is going to keep marching up?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, I think the safe bet here is, as well, if you look at the curve that we've seen over the last decade, is that it will continue to grow. It doesn't have the same rate of growth as solar just because it's not as much of a commodity. Certainly, China is trying its best and succeeding in parts in making it a commodity and building it at a mass scale. Again, it's a manufacturing question as well, and that will continue to happen. But as Bryony mentioned earlier, solar is so modular that it really becomes like a commodity and is traded as such and installed as one as well.
Bryony Worthington
And it's more distributed, so it doesn't get so much organized opposition. Right. If you want to put in large-scale wind farms, even if they're offshore, you see this kind of — sometimes it's genuine, sometimes I think it's a manufactured kind of local response against something going into a landscape that wasn't there before. And so, yeah, that just creates friction in the system, slows things down.
David Roberts
But it's so modular, it's like water. Right. It finds the cracks.
Bryony Worthington
Oh, yeah. Solar is just so different. Yeah, it's tiny. It's like insects crawling out into a landscape as opposed to elephants you can see coming.
David Roberts
Final supply question, just on hydro. The demand story, which we're about to get into, is very much affected by weather, by yearly weather trends. Hydro is too, like, it kind of had a little mini boom in 2024, mainly because it was suppressed somewhat in 2023 by droughts. I wonder, long term, with climate change getting worse, presumably temperatures getting higher, presumably droughts getting more frequent, should we worry about hydro? I mean, hydro, as we've said, has been just like steady there, you know, for decades now. Is it going to get substantially less reliable because of climate?
Like how, how big of an effect can we expect weather to have on the reliability of that steady hydro?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, I mean, historically, there have always been droughts, but certainly, climate change creates conditions where droughts can be more severe, that can be longer as well. But my reading of the situation changes very frequently on hydro. So we have the sort of IPCC view which looks at a very long-term outlook of rainfall volumes, et cetera. And they also did an assessment on the effects on energy supply, including electricity supply. And for some regions, there are expectations that that could actually increase. So in Latin America, it could increase rainfall volumes, but there are two different trends that are going against each other here.
So, you might have a total volume increase in rainfall, which can come from higher temperatures, more precipitation, etc. But on the other hand, obviously, hydro infrastructure is fixed in location and it's a built-up process over decades and decades, so you can't really move them around. So obviously, if you have shifting rainfall patterns, even just on a small regional basis, that can affect your river catchment. How much volume is really flowing into your hydro dam. And that can be quite an upsetting experience. This year we had some really poor drought conditions, even though hydro generation on the global level is up.
You had some really horrendous situations in Ecuador and in Zambia, Uganda, quite a few of those stories going on. But those sorts of events have also happened frequently as long as hydropower has been a part of the system. So, it's really difficult to predict. But the most important thing is that even though there are fluctuations from year to year and they can make or break, let's say, a headline that we're writing for a report, the existing stock of hydropower and how much it generates in the system is an incredibly important part of our electricity system.
So, for some countries, it is the entire electricity generation and an export product as well. Countries like Laos are exporting a huge amount of electricity, and it's a big part of their economy. So, hydropower in and of itself shouldn't be demonized as a result of it being affected by weather conditions. But it is certainly a trend that we'll have to be aware of and have to keep track of as we go into the future. But again, like we know, wind and solar are coming online at a much faster rate. And I'm not worried that even if there's a long-term decrease in hydropower, even if that materializes, the efficiency of hydropower, I don't think it'll make or break the energy transition as a whole.
Bryony Worthington
There are a few other factors which make it hard to predict. One is the fact that as we get into a changed climate, we're going to have to introduce more water management because you've got a lot of rivers that are just fed by melt waters from snowpacks. And that's going to become increasingly difficult and you're likely to need to see more water management infrastructure being put in place. And if that's coupled with electricity generation, then that's going to provide you with a win-win in terms of how we're looking at water flows throughout this now changed climate.
The other thing I think that's really important is the upgrading and the repowering of some of these hydro facilities, which is often overlooked. But technology moves on, you can get more out of the same amount of water. You can fit pumped storage into certain reservoirs where the conditions are there. So you're seeing reinvestment into hydro. And I can't stress enough how important it is that we hold onto the clean sources that we have because they are providing the bulk of the clean electricity today. And if they stay in place, this rise in wind and solar will kick out fossil.
If they decline, we're just pedalling really fast to go to a standstill.
David Roberts
Yes, another shout out to Germany here for maybe going the wrong way on that. Okay, so I could talk about supply all day, but we're already behind schedule. Let's talk about demand. The big demand story for this year is that it was a hot year, which pushed up demand for AC, which sort of made demand rise unusually fast, faster than clean energy could keep up with this year. This meant that fossil electricity actually rose in China, India, and the US. But what the report says is if the temperature goes back to, you know, the average projected temperature, demand will settle back a few percentage points and from that point on, clean energy will be able to keep up with all the new demand.
That's kind of the story. So, aside from the year-to-year fluctuations, weather-based fluctuations, one of the things I'm interested in which the report spends some time talking about is, you know, the big picture here is everybody's electrifying. Electrification is the thing. It is the way to solve climate change. It is the key to the kingdom. Everybody's doing it. Which means, you know, as the report notes, there's data centers coming online, there's EVs coming online, there's home heating in the form of heat pumps coming online. So, I would expect from all of that an enduring secular rise in electricity demand — like that is what I would expect to see.
So when are we going to see that? When are we going to see that? And how big is it going to be? And are you still confident that wind and solar are going to keep up, even given this, all this new incoming electricity demand?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, absolutely. So, as you pointed out, we have this temperature — what we call like a temperature effect this year — where we have had a relatively mild 2023. So, obviously, if you look at the top line numbers, you get temperature records and the effects of climate change are very noticeable there as well. So, you have temperature records in 2023, but what's relevant for electricity generation is specifically how often you have high temperatures in and around population centers. So, 2023 for that was a relatively mild year, especially in the summer. It was also mild here in the winter.
So, we had not as much heating demand in the winter. But 2024, specifically for cooling, was a completely different story. So, it was especially in the US, India, China, we had prolonged intense heat waves that have really contributed to electricity demand growth. And while we have that underlying temperature effect from climate change as well, this story of 2024 is really about that fluctuation between the years and that's why demand growth was so high in 2024. But if we peel that back, so we've looked at this and have adjusted for this fluctuation from year to year and we're still left with demand growth that is substantially higher than the last decade.
David Roberts
Even taking the weather effect out of it?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, exactly. Even if you take it out. So just to put some numbers on that, we had 4% was the actual recorded demand growth in 2024. Then when you take the weather effect out, so you're left with the sort of non-temperature related, or you could call it structural demand growth. You had 3.3%. Now that's a lot lower. But your 10-year average before that is 2.5%.
David Roberts
So, we are seeing this start to happen then.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, exactly.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, it's kind of as you said, as we talked about, electrification is the thing that everybody now realizes has got so many multiple wins and is now becoming affordable, that yes, the demand is likely to rise. But what Ember's going to be increasingly looking at is then it's not just a story then about electricity markets decarbonizing, it's about electricity decarbonizing other sectors. So, you've got carbon savings and efficiency gains in the transport sector, in the industrial and heat sectors that are being delivered by this electrification. So, we might still be reporting on rising demand in electricity sectors and we might still see limited fossil growth to meet that demand, but it will be displacing fossils in other markets.
And that's the most important thing to bear in mind if you care about climate change. Then, I think the second thing to say is, if you've got rising demand for electricity, what happens is investors show up and projects get built and you don't need to sit around waiting for government interventions or carrots and sticks, whatever. It's just going to be a boom market where people are making money.
David Roberts
It is forcing the issue. That's how I put it. Same in the US. Every clean energy conversation that utilities had been sort of like dodging or slow-walking. They can't avoid it anymore. It's right up in their faces.
Bryony Worthington
Exactly.
David Roberts
But do we have any sense of — so it's like 3.1% — subtract the weather, you get 3.1% — which is above the whatever, 2 point, whatever average.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, 4% is the recorded growth in demand. And then 3.3% is what's left over.
David Roberts
Right, 3.3. So, do you have any predictions? I mean, one of the points, one of the really striking points, one of the really striking charts in your report is you show the range of predictions about data center deployment. And the point you make is the gap between the highest projection and the lowest projection is as big as the entire electricity demand of Australia. So, there's like a giant developed country's worth of uncertainty just in the data center projections, which is just to say that demand projections are just notoriously difficult. But that said, I'm going to force you to make one.
You know, the secular rise in demand. What do you expect to see? Do you expect to see that 3.3 grow up to 4 or 5 or beyond? Like, how fast of a rate of demand rise can we expect to see in like two years, three years, four years?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, so the 3.3 is already pretty much perfectly in line with what the IEA has said for the growth until 2030. So, if you go two years back in the World Energy Outlook, they gave a forecast of 2.7% growth. Then, last year, that was changed to 3.3%. And from our perspective, we're then obviously saying, "Okay, what does this actually mean for fossil generation?" And what we found is that all of the projections for the build-out of clean electricity are actually putting us on a path to meet 4.1% growth. So, a lot more than even the forecasted growth by the IEA.
So, and this is the gap that you're looking at when you're asking yourself, "Is fossil generation structurally —" obviously, you have year to year fluctuations. You know, if you have the right weather conditions or the wrong weather conditions, it can go either way, especially in the short term. But structurally and long term, we are still, even at higher demand growth rates, we're still looking at falls in fossil generation. And that's, I mean, first of all, that's a good sign. We're happy to see that.
David Roberts
So, you don't think there's any chance that demand could be substantially faster than predictions? Faster. So much faster that it outstrips clean energy? You just don't think that's likely?
Nicolas Fulghum
It is possible. But, I think this is where Bryony's point becomes really important. So, if we see electricity demand really grow much faster than 3.3%, if we are going up to 4.1 or higher, so even faster than clean electricity will grow, that will likely be caused by an even faster rate of electrification. So, demand growth in and of itself is not a bad thing at all.
David Roberts
No, it's a great sign. That's what we want to happen, right?
Nicolas Fulghum
Exactly. If it's for the right reasons. And EVs, heat pumps definitely count as those right reasons. Data centers are certainly one of the more difficult conversations within us.
David Roberts
Indeed.
Nicolas Fulghum
Just because the range is so large, as well as you pointed out, this uncertainty of like an Australia worth of electricity. That's just in the US over a four-year time frame.
David Roberts
Oh, I thought that was global. Oh geez, that's even crazier than I thought.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, so it's a huge, it's a huge number.
Bryony Worthington
And the data is really poor, right? It's really hard to get the data. And also, I mean, we're talking about data centers, but we shouldn't skip over cryptocurrency mining, right? Had we not had that add to our demand over the last X years, what would we have been facing? So, you know, it's, I mean, it feels as if this is necessarily going to involve more projects being built. And will they all be clean? Perhaps not, but they will be the fastest, by and large. And the fastest tends to correlate with clean at the moment.
So that's another factor to take into account.
David Roberts
Indeed. So, as you sort of mentioned, Nick, the point everyone's really eagerly waiting for and really hoping for, because you make the case in the report that even with this sort of secular growth in demand, this sort of enduring, probably permanent growth in demand happening with all these new sectors basically electrifying, clean energy will still stay ahead of that, which means clean energy will satisfy all the growth, which is like, good, fine. But what everybody really wants is for us to top that hill and head down the other side. That is, start eating into the installed base of fossil fuels.
Like, when will fossil fuel electricity start declining year on year? I mean, again, it's impossible to predict, but go ahead and predict anyway.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, I mean, this year, when you do that temperature adjustment, we already met 96% of the demand growth with growth in clean electricity. 96%, you might as well call it the whole thing.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Nicolas Fulghum
So structurally, we're there. Like, we're right at that tipping point. And annoyingly, tipping points make predictions really difficult. Especially if you're in a system that has some fluctuations, temperature, other questions about demand and supply, you do get years — like, even next year, if the conditions are wrong, we might see an increase in fossil generation.
David Roberts
Right. A bumpy plateau is what they call them.
Nicolas Fulghum
Exactly, a very bumpy plateau. But we have underlying drivers that are really hard to ignore. So the countries that are really driving — or have historically, let's say, over the last two decades, driven — this increase in fossil generation were emerging economies and kind of spearheaded by China and by India. And that's where we see the dynamic that we've already seen in Europe and in the US really play out of clean electricity coming in. But the different story in China and India is that what they're trying to do is they're trying to meet and satisfy rapidly growing demand, but they're doing that by building clean electricity faster than anyone else. So the two trajectories do match each other.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, I've been hearing about a peak in Chinese coal use, just tantalizing. People have been talking about it like, "Maybe this is the year, maybe next year is the year." As you say, it's bumpy, keeps not quite being the year. It would sure be satisfying to get like two or three years in a row of that happening just so we could feel that it's really underway.
Bryony Worthington
There might be some surprising new S-curves that emerge out of China with regard to storage, which they've been putting in huge amounts of capacity, but there's still a reasonable amount of curtailment. Lots of concerns about grid capacity. But even there, they've done huge amounts on high voltage DC cabling, which has moved the electrons around. But this next wave of investment into storage might see the coal burn come down because a lot of the coal in China is used for CHP, right? It's not just providing power, it's also providing heat. And if they start to invest in thermal stores as well as other forms of storage, that would be a big game changer in terms of then pulling down the coal burn and making more use of the electrons they have.
I think, as with everything energy-related, the future is probably going to be dictated by China. And that's certainly true of the global peak in emissions from the power sector.
David Roberts
Yeah, well, this is a perfect segue to my next question. The analogy I thought of when I was reading this is like when you discuss public transit in the US. When you squint at the numbers, what you realize is that something like 75 to 80% of transit riders in the US are just in New York City. So, when you talk about transit in the US, you are sort of, whether you like it or not, by proxy, just kind of talking about New York City for the most part. And I think of a similar thing with clean energy and China, like we're calling these global secular trends.
But if you look, China installed, I mean, just in this report, just in this last year, China installed the most solar, the most wind, the most hydrogen, the most coal. The most nuclear, only gas, literally only gas US took that crown. Gas is the only source that China did not build the most of. So, it's like, how much are we just kind of talking about China here? Like, how much of this is global trends versus just like decisions that Chinese politicians are making? Like, what would this supposed global solar revolution even look like if you subtracted China out of it?
Do you know what I mean?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, I mean, it would certainly be a lot slower, but there's a different side to it as well. Because on the demand side, China also makes up a huge amount of global electricity demand. So, I don't have the specific number, but it's almost around a third, a little bit less than a third of global demand. So naturally, we do expect an electricity system of that size to outweigh the contributions from others. But you're right that it's not just outweighing them.
David Roberts
It's dwarfing everything.
Nicolas Fulghum
It's dwarfing everything. So, we didn't just have the largest solar increase, both capacity and generation, in China. It was more than the rest of the world combined. So, it's really a completely different scale. And it's both a combination of very specific government directives. The policies behind this are obviously over a longer time period. They have a very clear goal for installations. But even if you just read the text that comes out for targets, that transition has happened a lot faster. The underlying technology, both on the solar side and the wind side, has moved a lot faster than even the Chinese government had expected.
So, they've already achieved their targets for 2030, so they're moving faster than even they thought they would move. And I think that should be a very positive sign for other countries that are in a similar position. So, Brazil is sometimes the example that we pull out there because on a smaller scale it kind of is like China or India, it's growing at a relatively steady but rapid pace. So, we have pretty high electricity demand growth knocking on kind of 5% per year. And it's satisfying all of that with wind and solar generation. So, new wind and solar coming online is meeting all of that demand.
And China is just doing the same thing on a much, much larger scale. But it's looking very similar, like this year, similar experience to the world as a whole. We had a very temperature-driven, heat-wave-driven, high demand growth. But underneath that, we've met this structural underlying demand growth, almost all of that was met by increases in wind generation, solar generation, hydro, and nuclear. So we're really seeing this dynamic play out. And if China hits that tipping point and India is getting closer to that tipping point, we know the EU and the US are already at that point, then it's really hard for the world as a whole to not also go beyond that tipping point and see some falls in fossil generation.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, when you think about China, the single most important thing to think about is their geology, which just doesn't have oil and gas.
David Roberts
Yes, I was going to bring that up.
Bryony Worthington
So naturally, then they look to the world and think, "Electricity is the way that we will power our economy." And that's in distinct difference from say, Russia, which is entirely reliant on its massive fossil fuel reserves. And now the big question is, where does the US align itself? Is the US going to stay with fossil fuels because it's also hugely endowed with fossil fuels? It'll probably have to ride both horses. But the China direction is very clear and China has an active overseas investment program. It has south to south collaborations all over the world. The relationship between Brazil and China is very strong, you name it.
And there's a south-to-south conversation happening about these win-win situations where China's providing the technology that allows people to generate their own secure sources of clean power. And they are a big force in the world right now.
David Roberts
Yes, and worryingly, we seem to be aligning ourselves with Russia in that broad movement. It just doesn't seem like a great long-term bet to me. So, let's briefly talk about India. I mean, I think in the, let's just say in the clean energy mind in the US, you know, we're not legendary for our detailed knowledge of other countries. In the US clean energy mind, I sort of think about India as like a slightly smaller China on the same trajectory a ways behind. Is that roughly accurate in energy terms? I mean, they're trying to do the same thing.
Right. They'll move straight from coal to renewables. They don't have the same penetration yet, but they're trying to catch up. Is the situation substantially different in India and China? Like, what's your sort of take on India's situation?
Nicolas Fulghum
So, the similarities are that they are kind of beholden to exactly the same logic that any country that's growing their electricity demand is subject to. So, if your demand goes up and you don't build clean electricity, you're going to have to meet demand with fossil generation. But if you do build a lot of clean electricity, then you don't need as much fossil generation. Those rules apply to both countries. The difference is that China is obviously now turning this tide where they're reaching the tipping point. They're meeting almost all of the electricity demand growth with clean electricity.
So, they're already approaching the bumpy plateau, as we call it earlier. India is in a situation where they've reached this point later. So, they're now what we in the report call "decoupling." So, they're decoupling the growth of electricity demand and the growth of fossil power. Specifically for China and India, when we say fossil power, it's almost entirely coal power. So, they're decoupling this. And India is obviously now doing this at a point in time where the economics for clean electricity are really favorable. When China decoupled, it was almost a bit more than a decade ago already because they built a lot of hydro and then a lot of wind and now a lot, a lot of solar.
The economics weren't quite as favorable, but that's why they're already further ahead. But India has a chance to do this turnaround even faster because they have access to cheap, affordable, and flexible solar power and batteries. So we're obviously, like you said, we're on a different point in our journey, but we will see a lot smaller increases in fossil generation than historically while electricity demand will continue to grow. And this is sort of the question of is it going to be rising electricity demand that's met by all of the above, or is it going to be rising electricity demand that's met by solar power, wind power, and other clean power?
Bryony Worthington
Just to add to that, I think the difference, though, of course, is the politics where you do not have a command and control planned economy and you have a very agrarian population. So, the country is hugely densely populated and the land is very intensively used. Couple that with very powerful states and a fairly weak federal government, and it's a bit of a messy picture. And that part explains why it's been slower and it might act as a brake on the pace. But that said, distributed solar, rooftop solar has got a huge way to go.
David Roberts
The conditions you're describing are precisely what make it fertile for distributed solar. Right. Like poor planning, poor tracking, you know, a poor grid, like poor grid reliability.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, and also this, you know, you're seeing these battery swapping technologies being deployed in countries like India because you can't rely on the grid. Batteries are your friend. And so, you can imagine there's just huge potential in that manufactured battery plus solar sense. But waiting for large-scale investments in large wind farms and even nuclear, or certainly with regard to more big infrastructure, that just might be slower than China can do. Utility-scale anything, China's been brilliant at. But we'll see.
Nicolas Fulghum
We do have some positive news, even on the utility side there. So, on a planning perspective, like Bryony said, it's obvious we're not talking about the same scale as China, but India also has a relatively ambitious target for 500 gigawatts of renewable capacity installed or clean power capacity installed by 2030. And they have done an increasingly better job at tracking their own capacity deployment. In those numbers, what we can see is that they have a lot of projects already under construction. And those projects, specifically for wind and solar capacity that are currently being built and are kind of slated to be installed by 2028, are going to double India's wind and solar capacity. And that's only — by 2028, we're only talking three, four years into the future.
So, this is obviously not; it's a really fast rate of growth. It's not quite the rate of growth that we've seen in China, but especially when there's less state capacity to direct some of this build-out and roll-out. The question falls even more to economics and as we've gone over before, like economics are just pointing in the right direction as well.
David Roberts
Yeah, I really like distributed energy in India. I think it is one of the really interesting global topics right now. Can we talk a little bit about gas? The role of coal, I think, is pretty straightforward. It's somewhat shocking. The top line number is that coal is still providing more than a third of global electricity. That's just straightforwardly bad. That's the climate problem. If you're targeting the climate problem, step one is getting rid of that. Gas is a little bit more complicated. Some countries, notably the US, a lot of the decarbonization it's done so far has been via gas.
And now, the US is trying very hard to liquefy its gas and export it to places. And so right now, like China for instance, is stuck in this dilemma. We don't have any gas, so if we're going to get off coal, it's got to be clean energy, which is like, you know, a bracing choice. But if you flood a bunch of clean gas into that equation, is it going to slow that down? Like, are you worried about LNG blunting any of this momentum?
Bryony Worthington
Nick, I don't know if you want to take this first. I mean, it's true though, right? What you said is true that if you look at Europe and you look at the North American story, a large part of what we did was switch from coal to gas as we discovered our own resources. In the UK's example, it was the North Sea gas, in America it was the fracking boom. And that's definitely helped pull down the carbon intensity of our power. It's had other problems associated with it, not least the methane associated with that. But the shift now, of course, is that it's not that cheap.
Even if we see the US bringing on board lots of LNG export capabilities, that will increase the cost of gas domestically. And how popular will that be for US citizens? Right at the root of this is that it's not free and cheap to get gas out of the ground and to get it to your customer; it's pretty hard. So, there are some fixed costs. There's lots of talk about whether it needs to be $80 a barrel or can you survive on $50 a barrel. But at some point, you can't allow it to go too cheap because that will then start to see supply come off because then no one makes any money.
So, it's just this — I just think that this is a big, century-long paradigm shift away from fuels. And gas, at the moment, is the fuel that we're at, the margin that we're trying to displace, but it will lose because it's less ubiquitous and it's more expensive. And so, I think this idea that you can't run an economy without fossil fuels is a nice lie you can tell yourself for a certain amount of time until the evidence becomes overwhelming that you can. And we're getting close to that point now, I think.
David Roberts
I don't know. We here in the US can tell ourselves lies for a long time.
Bryony Worthington
That's your choice.
David Roberts
We're doubling down on that whole strategy.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, I kind of wanted to pick up on something that you said about the outlier role that the US plays here with gas as well. So, in 2024, the increase in gas in the US was more than half of the global increase. So, just the US alone.
David Roberts
Slower than solar, but faster than wind in the US.
Nicolas Fulghum
Slower than solar, but faster than wind. That's exactly right. But if we just look at the very recent trend in the US, so this is the first three months of 2025, this is kind of getting into slightly breaking news territory because we basically only looked at those numbers today, more or less. And what we're seeing is exactly that dynamic that Bryony pointed out play out. So, gas usage was relatively high. It was a cold winter. The storage for gas was depleted much quicker than energy analysts expected. Gas prices rose up. So, a lot of that gas was used for heating.
That also makes it more expensive for gas power. And as a result, we actually had the first quarter of falling gas generation in three years.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Nicolas Fulghum
And that is, it's the first time really in a long time that we've seen a switch from gas to coal. Obviously, at the same time, increases in wind, increases in solar are dampening a lot of this. But underneath, there's a really interesting dynamic and one that the US will have to grapple with more and more if you connect yourself to global markets. And I think you had a really interesting conversation with a US congressman about this as well, where he pointed out that, "Yeah, this is going to be really unpopular." And there was a really neat line there that I think applies not just to the US but "If you do the math right, there are a lot more consumers in the US that are dependent on low utility bills than there are gas producers that are profiting from this."
David Roberts
There are a lot of gas producers, but not that many.
Bryony Worthington
Yeah, there are a lot. It's true. It's almost a form of distributed energy in the US, really.
David Roberts
I know. One other thing about gas. You've been doing this for six years now. Can you see in the data Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the sort of, you know, because that just dominated energy discussion for a long time. Have you seen that show up in the data and exactly how, what did that cause?
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, there's the very immediate effect of just a massive fall in electricity demand in Ukraine specifically. Obviously, that's the direct effect of the invasion and the destruction that has happened in the country. But sort of, if you go more to the regional level, especially if you look at the EU, you've seen a very swift response and also a response that started to tackle topics that were really unpopular before. So obviously, the EU relied on cheap gas. Specifically, Germany relied on cheap gas imports from Russia for a lot of its economic activity. And if anyone had said four or five years ago that the EU could largely wean itself off Russian gas within like a three-year time frame, then that would have probably been seen as a completely ridiculous assertion.
But a lot has happened in that time and there are legislative reasons that the EU has moved to wind and solar faster than they've ever done before. The EU Green Deal is a big part of this. So, it's five years since that's been passed, but a lot of it was also that reaction. And you can again see this role of the distributed versatile nature of solar, because what we really saw is a massive boom in rooftop solar installations in Europe as a response. Utility bills were really high.
David Roberts
Yeah, Germany's electricity costs are super high now, aren't they? I mean, in part as a result of some of this.
Nicolas Fulghum
Yeah, it's come down a little bit since the peak, but the energy crisis was felt in the EU. As a result, it's a global market specifically for gas and coal. The EU imports a lot of this, but so does South Korea, so does Japan, so do a lot of countries in Southeast Asia. They all felt the increase of coal prices and increase of gas prices. We've recently also published our European Electricity Review, which we always do at the beginning of the year, talking about Europe and just the wind and solar installations that we've seen over the last five years have avoided around 59 billion Euros of fossil fuel imports.
So, just for American audiences, it's US$64 billion roughly. So, it's a huge amount of saved money. This is roughly equivalent to the nominal GDP of a country the size of Slovenia. And that's in savings. That's just in savings. So, it's a very unfortunate event that has led to some fortunate turns within energy policy in Europe.
David Roberts
And permanent, you think, like not something that can be switched back once this dies down?
Bryony Worthington
It's unlikely because you've got market forces, but you've also got policy packages which are long negotiated and once they're in place, they tend to stick around. Of course, there's populist opposition to it, but basically, Europe, I think, is going to stay the course. And the reason I say that is I just came back from Poland and there's a country that felt that "We couldn't afford to follow Germany's path."
David Roberts
And that's the most coal-intensive EU plus state, as I recall?
Bryony Worthington
Still, by far and away, the most coal-intensive. But if you look at their recent data, the big growth has been in wind and solar. And they're starting that transition at a time when the costs have come down to the point where it makes economic sense for them and it's seen as secure. For Poland, energy security is far and away more important than anything. You can imagine exactly where they are on that eastern fringe of Europe. And so the fact that that wind and solar is their own, it's similar to coal in that way that they can control it, they're not exposed to international markets.
So, you're starting to see this benefit both in terms of — there's a side benefit which is environmental, but mainly it's about security and cost.
David Roberts
A sort of parallel point to the one we were making earlier, which is there are a lot more fossil fuel importing countries than there are fossil fuel exporting countries. So, there's a lot more countries for whom security means domestic renewables. Right. Getting off those imports. I mean, that's kind of like — it's interesting that renewables and national security are kind of converging here and there. Final question, which you just kind of touched on briefly in passing. There are two ways of looking at the current political situation. On the one hand, it seems like there is something like a global populist backlash happening.
It's showing up a little bit in the EU, it's obviously over the top happening in the US, glimmers of it in Canada, et cetera. And part of that backlash, you know, part of that political backlash is a backlash against green energy. You know, like the Conservative Party in the UK used to be sort of like rhetorically supportive of the energy transition. Now they're saying net zero by 2050 is impossible. So a dim view could say a lot of this progress is going to be pulled back in coming years through policy backlash. The other way to look at it is if you look at the sort of deployment numbers of wind and solar over the last several decades, they just go up and up and you can't really see political — you know what I mean?
Like, you can't find bad political periods in there. They just go up regardless. So, maybe it doesn't matter. So, like, I guess, are you worried that this political backlash is going to show up in the numbers? Is it going to temper these numbers at all, these growth numbers?
Nicolas Fulghum
So, I think there is an aspect here where this is a technological transition. It's a transition based on changes in the underlying technology. And that's not something that you can kind of put back into the bottle. And like we said, I think at the beginning of this conversation, it can't be done by one government either, by one government changing its policies. Obviously, there are short-term effects that can hamper the build-out of wind power in the US or can, on the opposite side, accelerate it. But it's going to be increasingly harder to go against the economics of renewables.
And we know that the energy system is really changing away from one where you're shipping billions of tons of fossil fuels around the globe. Some of this political backlash might be around messaging, but whether it's a climate question, like a net zero 2050 target, or an energy security question, luckily the solution for both is exactly the same thing. It is that transformation of the energy system away from fossil fuels to a more reliable and efficient system. Those power sources are homegrown wind and solar produced at home. You don't have to have an import terminal; there are no licensing issues around who can sell you liquefied natural gas.
So, wind and solar are really the fastest way to cut your dependence on volatile global fossil markets. Whether it's the US, whether it's Japan, whether it's Germany, they're all subject to this. And it's just not a question of energy security on one hand or climate policy on the other hand. It's the same answer so the two really go hand in hand.
David Roberts
That's the beautiful development that's happened over the course of my career is that now, no matter what the question is, the answer is more solar and batteries. Okay, well, this is a fascinating overview of what's happening. Any sort of concluding comments, any other...?
Bryony Worthington
I guess my thoughts about this next era we're going into is this: it is never going to be necessarily an easy transition. You're moving from one energy system dominated by a fuel-based energy system into a completely different paradigm. And it could take us the best part of a century. And it's going to be choppy, but the direction of travel is pretty obvious, and that's because of the things we talked about. It'll be better environmentally, better in terms of energy security, and certainly better in terms of cost and efficiency. So this is just going to happen. The headwinds we're facing, some of them are just coincidence, but some of them are not.
We're basically seeing a new world order being written through energy, which is going to change how countries operate. It's going to change the wealth of different nations, and it's certainly going to affect the people who've currently made a huge amount of money from fossil fuels. So, I think the headwinds actually are a sign that we're winning, that this transition has not gone unnoticed, that people can see that the way that the world used to work is moving away from them. And there's going to be reactions, but ultimately just physics and technology progress will win. It's just a question of when.
And we can do it the slow way and the painful way, or we can speed it up and get to the cleaner, better system faster. And that's partly through providing reports like this that Ember produces. We're showing that the speed is already pretty impressive and people might be underestimating it. But we're also explaining the scale of the challenge ahead and it will move forward. Ultimately, more people are building more things and they're increasingly clean. So that's what gives me hope.
David Roberts
Awesome. Nick, do you want to add anything?
Nicolas Fulghum
I mean, I'd do well, if I could top that in any way. So, I'm going to... I'm going to leave that as it was.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
