Chart: World could triple renewable energy by decade’s end

Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. Canary thanks Clean Energy Counsel for its support of the column.

Last year’s COP28 meeting produced an ambitious goal: More than 100 countries pledged to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Nearly one year later, the world is not on track to hit this target.

But renewables are growing at a blistering pace, offering hope that the COP28 target is still within reach, according to the International Energy Agency’s annual report on renewables, released this week.

Between 2024 and 2030, the world is expected to build over 5,500 gigawatts — or 5.5 terawatts — of renewable energy capacity. Between 2017 and 2023, the world added just over 2 terawatts of clean energy. China alone will build more than half of this total — 3.2 terawatts, to be precise — while the European Union and the U.S. are each set to build about one-tenth. India, forecast to build 350 gigawatts’ worth of renewables between now and 2030, will likely be the next biggest contributor.

That would be a huge increase, and nearly enough to get the world to the COP28 target: The IEA expects global renewable capacity to grow by 2.7 times by 2030.

The vast majority of new renewable capacity will come from solar installations both big and small. Between now and 2030, IEA projects the world will build 2.5 terawatts of utility-scale solar and nearly 1.7 terawatts of distributed solar. For comparison, just 745 gigawatts of large-scale solar and 556 gigawatts of small-scale solar were built between 2017 and 2023.

If solar grows at this rate, it will become the largest source of renewable energy in the world by the end of the decade, leapfrogging wind and hydropower. And should IEA’s forecast for overall renewable energy additions prove accurate, just under half of global electricity generation — not capacity, generation — will come from renewables by 2030.

At this point, there’s really no question as to whether renewable energy will expand quickly in the coming years. The only questions are whether it will expand quickly enough — and to what extent it will actually displace fossil fuels. 

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