According to the annual global electricity review conducted by the energy think tank Emberthe amount of electricity and greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants likely peaked in 2023. This means that human civilization has likely passed a key turning point, according to Ember: countries will probably never generate so much electricity again come fossil fuels.
Greenhouse gases in the United States
Last year, a record high of 30% of electricity globally came from renewable energy sources, thanks mainly to the growth of solar and wind energy. Starting this year, pollution from the energy sector is likely to begin to decline, with a 2% drop in the amount of fossil fuel-powered electricity expected by 2024 – a decline that Ember expects will accelerate in the long term.
“An important turning point in the history of energy”
“The decline in emissions from the energy sector is now inevitable. 2023 was probably the tipping point, a major turning point in the history of energy“, he has declared Dave Jones, director of insights at Ember, in an emailed statement. “But the pace… depends on how quickly the renewable energy revolution continues”.
The green transition
It’s a transition that could happen much quicker if it weren’t for the United States, which are already the largest gas producer in the world, using record amounts of gas last year. Without the United Stateshe notes Ember, electricity generation from gas was expected to decline globally in 2023. Global economies, excluding the United States, managed to generate 62 terawatt-hours less of gas-fired electricity last year than the year before. But the United States increased electricity generation from gas by nearly double that amount over the same time frame, or another 115 TWh from gas in 2023.
A big part of the problem is that the United States is replacing most of its older power plants that run on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, with gas-fired plants instead of carbon-pollution-free alternatives. “The United States is swapping one fossil fuel for another“, he said Jones. “After two decades of such heavy reliance on gas energy, the United States has a great journey ahead of it to get to a truly clean energy system”.
Electricity and renewables
Second Emberthe United States gets only 23% of its electricity from renewable energy, lower than the global average of 30%.
President Joe Biden set a goal of achieving 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035 and signed into law the nation’s largest investment in clean energy and climate to date with theInflation Reduction Act. But the administration’s ability to force a transition to cleaner energy is limited after the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the Environmental Protection Agency should not be allowed to determine how the United States generates its electricity. Since then, the EPA’s long-awaited rules for greenhouse gas emissions from power plants have focused on energy companies capturing carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Fortunately, the renewable energies have become remarkably affordable, with solar now considered the cheapest source of electricity in history and the fastest growing energy source for 19 consecutive years.
Outdated technologies
“Outdated technologies from the last century can no longer compete with exponential innovations and declining cost curves in renewable energy and storage“, he has declared Christiana Figueresformer executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in an emailed statement.
The report of Ember is in line with other forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which in October defined “unstoppable” the transition to clean energy. The IEA predicts a peak in global demand for coal, gas and oil this decade (for all energy uses, not just electricity). Renewable energy is also expected to account for nearly 50% of the global energy mix by 2030.
Ember is a little more optimistic after more than 130 countries committed to tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030 during the United Nations climate summit in December. With these advances, renewable electricity globally would reach 60% by the end of the decade, up from less than 20% in 2000.
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