Coal has dominated global electricity generation for roughly 100 years. In 2025, renewables quietly pushed past it, driven almost entirely by one technology growing faster than any power source in recorded history.

  • 636 TWh: record global increase in solar generation in 2025 (+30%)
  • 75%: share of the world's new electricity demand met by solar alone
  • 99%: share of global demand growth met by wind and solar combined
  • 336 TWh: China's share of the global solar increase — more than half

A record that beat the previous record by a third

Global solar generation grew by 636 terawatt-hours in 2025, according to the energy think tank Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026. That single-year jump was 33% larger than the previous record set just one year earlier, and roughly four times the size of solar's annual growth back in 2020.

To put that scale in context: global electricity demand grew by 849 TWh in 2025. Solar alone covered 75% of that entire increase — meaning more than three-quarters of the world's additional electricity needs for the year were met without burning any additional fossil fuel.

Where the growth actually happened

China drove more than half of the global solar increase, adding 336 TWh of new solar generation in a single year. The United States added 85 TWh and the European Union added 60 TWh, meaning the growth was concentrated but not confined to any single region.

Wind power added another 205 TWh of its own, a 8.2% increase. Combined, wind and solar met 99% of the entire increase in global electricity demand in 2025 — effectively covering almost all of the world's new power needs without additional fossil generation.

Renewables surpassed one-third of global electricity generation in 2025 and overtook coal in the global power mix for the first time in roughly a century, Ember's analysis found.

What this means for coal and nuclear

Nuclear power also grew in 2025, adding 35 TWh (+1.3%), driven by new reactors coming online in China, France, and Japan, partially offset by plant closures in Belgium. That growth was real, but it was dwarfed by solar's scale — nuclear's entire annual increase was smaller than solar's growth in China alone.

Coal, by contrast, lost ground. With solar and wind absorbing almost all new demand growth, utilities had less need to run existing coal plants as heavily, let alone build new ones. Ember's authors, including senior data analyst Nicolas Fulghum, frame this less as coal collapsing overnight and more as renewables finally growing fast enough to absorb demand growth that coal and gas plants would otherwise have been built to serve.

None of this means fossil fuels are gone from the grid. Coal and gas still generate a large share of the world's electricity, and plenty of existing coal plants will keep running for years. What changed in 2025 is the marginal math: for the first time in a century, the new electricity the world needed came overwhelmingly from the sun and the wind, not from a power plant burning something.