If you live in the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking that renewable energy is on its way out. In July, Congress voted to phase out long-standing tax credits for wind and solar power, and the Trump administration has apparently taken every step in its power to halt the development of individual wind and solar projects — even as domestic demand for electricity rises and new sources of electricity become more important than ever.
But even as clean energy deployment faces hurdles in the United States, the entire world set a new record for investment in renewable energy in the first half of this year. Wind and solar energy meet, and even exceed, the global increase in energy demand. Indeed, electricity production from these sources is increasing faster than the world can use it, displacing some of the energy produced from fossil fuels. That’s according to a report released Tuesday by Ember, a global energy think tank, which mapped this year’s global electricity supply by analyzing monthly data from 88 countries responsible for more than 90% of global electricity demand.
“Overall, we’re talking about the world, renewables have overtaken coal,” said Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, senior electricity analyst at Ember and co-author of the company’s report. “And I expect that to hold.” This year marks the first time that renewable energy sources have overtaken coal in the global energy mix. In fact, global consumption of fossil fuels for electricity has decreased slightly compared to the same period in 2024.
Another report released this week by the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental energy research and policy organization, projects that the amount of installed renewable energy, that is, the maximum amount of energy that can be produced by systems such as solar fields, hydroelectric dams and wind turbines, will more than double by the end of this decade. National policies encouraging the development of green technologies as well as the precipitous drop in the price of solar energy – mainly driven by Chinese manufacturers, who make more than 80% of the world’s solar energy components – are largely driving the transition.
And even that projection might be conservative.
“The IEA has consistently underestimated over the past two decades how quickly renewable energy is growing,” said Robert Brecha, senior climate and energy advisor at Climate Analytics, a global climate science and policy institute, who was not involved in either Ember’s or the IEA’s report. “I see no reason to believe that renewable energy will not double by 2030.”
The vast majority of renewable energy expected to come online in the coming years will come from solar power, which has already met more than 80% of new global energy demand in the first six months of 2025, according to the Ember report. In China, the world’s largest growing renewable energy market, and India, which is poised to become the second largest market, a surge in solar power generation is responsible for a historic global decline in coal-fired electricity.
In the United States and the European Union, however, fossil fuel production increased in the first half of this year. In Europe, poor wind conditions and drought, rather than state policies, have reduced the bloc’s wind and hydropower output, leading to a 14% increase in gas-fired power generation. Across the Atlantic, coal-fired electricity generation in the United States increased by 17 percent.
The policy outlook for renewable energy in the United States is so bleak that the IEA lowered forecasts for growth in the country’s renewable energy capacity by 50 percent compared to last year’s projections. This drop caused by the United States lowers the agency’s global projections for renewable energy growth by 5%. However, overall, the IEA still expects renewable energy capacity to grow even faster between 2025 and 2030 than it did between 2020 and 2025.
“They can slow it down; they can do a lot more damage than I thought,” Brecha said, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to slow the growth of renewable energy. “But they can’t stop it.”
