Electricity drives growth and prosperity. We use it to light our offices, heat our homes, and cook our food. We’ll be using a lot more of it for the surging demand in Africa and Asia, the boom in AI data centers, and the electrification of transport and industry worldwide.
The world needs to make an exponential leap in decarbonizing the power grid, the single largest source of annual emissions at 30 gigatons–around 40 percent of the global total. Over the next decade, the challenge is to reduce carbon pollution from the grid by nearly 20 gigatons even as the world’s demand for electricity keeps surging. To accelerate cuts to gas and coal and meet our 2035 interim goal, we’ll need to build 6x more solar than we have today and 4x as much wind. And to supplement those intermittent renewables, we’ll need vastly more battery storage plus a 70 percent expansion of nuclear energy capacity.
In 2025, for the first time, the world built enough solar and wind to stop fossil fuel growth in the power sector. Over the past six years, solar deployment alone has displaced 1.4 gigatons of emissions annually. But despite plunging prices and dramatic tech advances, renewables plus battery storage are still more expensive than gas in many places. Policy incentives are needed to bridge the gap.