Renewables surged in 2024 — but so did fossil fuels
The world is grappling with an energy crisis — not one of scarcity, but one created by overwhelming demand. More energy-hungry data centers and AI algorithms are coming online. Developing countries are using more energy to support their people and industries. And as the world electrifies — replacing gas cars with electric vehicles, for instance — it will use ever more power. So the electrical grid doesn’t just need renewables (and batteries to store their energy) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also to meet growing demand.
A new analysis from the Paris-based International Energy Agency puts some hard numbers to the challenge, finding that in 2024, electricity consumption jumped by 4.3 percent worldwide, almost double the annual average over the last decade. Power use in buildings accounted for nearly 60 percent of the growth last year, with other drivers including the ballooning of energy-intensive industries and the electrification of transportation.
“What is certain is that electricity use is growing rapidly, pulling overall energy demand along with it to such an extent that it is enough to reverse years of declining energy consumption in advanced economies,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, in a press release announcing the findings. “The result is that demand for all major fuels and energy technologies increased in 2024, with renewables covering the largest share of the growth, followed by natural gas.”
The good news is that the installation of renewables like wind and solar hit a record in 2024 for the 22nd consecutive year, according to the analysis, while 33 percent more nuclear capacity came online compared to 2023. Renewables and nuclear power combined for 80 percent of the increase in worldwide electricity generation. Together, the two sources handled 40 percent of overall generation for the first time, which meant energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by just 0.8 percent last year, compared with 1.2 percent in 2023.
At the same time, the global economy grew by more than 3 percent in 2024. Carbon dioxide emissions, in other words, didn’t keep up with economic growth, so CO2 emissions and economic growth are increasingly “decoupled,” the report notes. Beneath the headline numbers, however, the story varies region to region. While countries like the U.S. can easily deploy more renewables to reduce their emissions and still maintain economic growth — renewables actually encourage that growth — in 2024 the bulk of the rise in emissions came from developing economies. “We can have more energy and less emissions — we need to have more energy and less emissions,” said R. Max Holmes, president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who wasn’t involved in the analysis. “There are encouraging signs in this report that that decoupling is starting to take place.”
Still, no matter the country, renewables aren’t growing fast enough to displace fossil fuels: Oil demand rose by 0.8 percent in 2024 and coal by 1 percent. Natural gas demand went up 2.7 percent, far above the annual growth rate of 1 percent between 2019 and 2023. That was thanks to the growth of heavy industries along with brutal heat waves, especially in China and India. The hotter the world gets, the more people switch on their air conditioners, creating demand that power plants have to meet by burning fossil fuels, leading to even more warming and more AC use.
Even so, the report reveals that the world is making some progress in weaning itself off fossil fuels. In 2024, EVs accounted for a fifth of all car sales around the world. In the U.S., sales of electric heat pumps — which move heat from outdoor air into a home — jumped 15 percent last year, and now outsell gas furnaces by 30 percent. All told, since 2019, the deployment of solar and wind energy, nuclear power, EVs, and heat pumps now prevents the release of 2.6 billion metric tons of CO2 each year. “That’s about half the U.S. economy’s worth of emissions, and that’s just five solutions in five years,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a Minnesota-based climate nonprofit that wasn’t involved in the report. “We’re still far behind. All the bad news is still true — climate change is still happening, it’s bad, it’s ugly, we’re not doing enough. But I’m seeing an inflection point here.”
The big question in the U.S. is whether the new Trump administration, which has been aggressivelydismantlingclimateprogress in its first two months in office, can kneecap this shift to clean-energy. Experts say that there are fundamental market forces beyond the control of the federal government, namely that renewables are now cheaper to deploy than more fossil-fuel infrastructure. “The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward renewable and non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy sources, period,” Holmes said. “It is going to happen. What the Trump administration right now is doing can slow that transition, but it certainly can’t stop that transition.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Renewables surged in 2024 — but so did fossil fuels on Mar 27, 2025.