Renewable electricity generation grew by 9.8% in 2024, its fastest annual rate in recent years and more than seven times the 1.4% increase posted by non-renewable sources over the same period. Global renewable power capacity reached 5,149 GW by the end of 2025, after the addition of 692 GW, representing a 15.5% annual increase. The headline figures are strong. What they obscure is the scale of what still needs to happen.
Renewables accounted for 31.7% of global electricity generation in 2024, totalling 9,836 terawatt hours. The political architecture around that number is rapidly expanding. At the Bonn Climate Change Conference on 9 June 2026, the incoming COP31 Presidency of Türkiye announced a global electrification target aimed at raising the share of final energy demand met by electricity from just over 20% today to 35% by 2035. IRENA’s own modelling underpins the target, and translating the “35 by 35” goal into power sector terms produces a number that demands scrutiny: renewables would need to reach approximately 78% of global electricity generation by 2035, roughly 2.5 times their current share, within a decade.
The pace of deployment in 2025 offers some grounding. Solar and wind energy accounted for 96.8% of all net new renewable capacity, with photovoltaic installations adding 510.3 GW, a 27.2% increase, while wind energy recorded a record 158.7 GW of additions. Solar PV generation is expected to overtake wind and nuclear by 2026 and hydropower by 2029. The technology concentration in annual additions is now so pronounced that any policy or supply chain disruption affecting solar PV carries systemic risk for the entire global buildout.
Regional distribution remains deeply uneven. Asia accounted for 74.2% of global renewable capacity growth in 2025, adding 513.3 GW and reaching a total renewable capacity of 2,891 GW, with China alone responsible for 440.1 GW of new capacity, more than all other regions combined. Europe added 76.8 GW, North America 42.1 GW. In absolute terms, Asia produced 4,589 TWh of renewable electricity in 2024, a 14.3% increase. The Middle East recorded the highest regional growth rate at 17.3%, though its base of 76 TWh remains small relative to its ambitions.
Africa recorded its highest renewable capacity increase in 2025, rising 15.9% to add 11.3 GW, driven by Ethiopia, South Africa, and Egypt. Yet the continent generated just 227 TWh of renewable electricity in 2024. Africa’s structural financing constraints remain largely unresolved, and the outcomes of COP30 in Belém, while agreeing on a framework to mobilise $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 for climate action, did not close the implementation gap for the most capital-constrained economies.
The capacity share figures carry a quiet warning. The share of renewables in total capacity expansion in 2025 was 85.6%, down from 92.0% in 2024. That modest decline in share, even as absolute additions hit a record, reflects accelerating growth in non-renewable capacity additions running alongside renewables rather than being displaced by them. Global electricity demand is rising fast, driven by AI data centres, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and industrial electrification, precisely the sectors the COP31 electrification agenda targets.
The demand growth dynamic reshapes the arithmetic of the 78% target considerably. Meeting a larger share of a larger total requires absolute renewable generation to scale at rates the energy system has not previously attempted. Renewable electricity generation is expected to rise each year by roughly 1,050 TWh through 2030, with more than 600 TWh on average set to come from solar PV alone annually, and the combined share of solar PV and wind is projected to rise from 17% of total generation in 2025 to 27% by 2030. That trajectory, under current forecasts, reaches nowhere near 78% by 2035.
The electrification goal draws on IRENA’s latest roadmap, which finds electricity must rise from around 23% of final energy use today to 35% by 2035 and above 50% by 2050 to stay on a 1.5°C-compatible path. The COP31 Presidency has framed electrification partly as an energy security hedge, with protection from fossil fuel price shocks drawing fresh attention as elevated oil and gas prices force low- and middle-income countries to draw down their fiscal reserves. That framing is analytically sound. It is also politically convenient, allowing governments to pursue the same objective through an economic self-interest argument when climate commitments face domestic resistance.
What COP30 in Belém produced in terms of formal commitments was structurally limited. The final document declared the global shift toward low-emissions and climate-resilient development “irreversible and the trend of the future” and reaffirmed the Paris Agreement, but without a clear commitment to move away from fossil fuels. The assessment from the renewable energy community was that key elements on finance, technology transfer, and capacity building did not make it into the final text, and that what remained was a diluted set of messages that neither reflected the urgency nor provided governments with the implementation tools needed.
Against that political backdrop, the COP31 electrification target functions as a non-negotiated Action Agenda initiative, meaning it carries no binding force and relies on voluntary coalition-building ahead of the Antalya summit this November. The COP31 Presidency floated a Climate Implementation Bridge to help countries make progress on the proposed targets, though few details were available on how it would work or fit into the existing climate finance architecture. The gap between the ambition level of the targets and the specificity of the mechanisms to deliver them is the central structural problem the energy transition has faced at every COP, and 2026 is not clearly different.
Low-emissions energy sources, renewables led by solar and nuclear, are projected to see their share in global electricity generation rise to 50% through 2030, up from 42% in 2025, and coal use in the power sector is expected to shift to a declining trajectory with its share falling to 27% by 2030 from 34% in 2025. That is meaningful directional progress. It is also still a trajectory that leaves the world around 28 percentage points short of the renewable share needed for the electrification target to be met with clean power. The technologies and, in most markets, the economics are no longer the constraint. Whether the policy coherence, grid infrastructure investment, and financial flows to developing economies can match the ambition set in Bonn will determine whether the 2025 capacity records become a sustained inflection point or another data set in a long series of impressive-but-insufficient milestones.
