The global energy transition is progressing and the largest growth impulses were in 2024 in solar power and batteries. This is the balance of the independent British Energy Denkfabrik Ember, which has submitted its more than hundred-sided report on the current development of electrification in 88 countries this Tuesday. Germany, one of these countries, which together represent 93 percent of the global electricity needs, ranks ninth worldwide with its electricity requirements – with a share of renewable energy sources of 57 percent in the previous year, significantly above the European average of 41 percent regenerative. In 2024, Germany was the fourth largest producer of low -emission electricity from solar power. Coal burning as electricity had halved on a fifth in the past decade. The experts from Ember see the country on the way to reaching the target – a regenerative proportion of 75 percent – until 2030. “Solar is the engine” as the motor of the new dynamics, the British energy experts in Germany, and worldwide, see in particular the recently exponentially rising solar power, combined with saving batteries. “Solar is once again the engine of electrification,” the researchers write. In just three years, the solar days worldwide would have doubled to more than 2,000 terawatt hours. Wind electricity also increased, most recently more than eight percent compared to the previous year, while the electricity shares by hydropower plants – with a 14 percent share in the global electricity market – still have a guide under the regenerative. However, the experts make no secret of the fact that, given the dynamics of solar growth in many countries and the energetic independence that solar panels can offer, they calculate a further significant shift in the regenerative shares in favor of the sun harvest. The Ember analysts speak of an “irrepressible power of solar energy”. As far as the countries are concerned, China mainly protrudes, which in 2024 covered its enormously rapidly growing electricity needs of 81 percent from renewable energy sources, and India, whose solar capacities almost doubled in one year. The addition of “green”, climate -friendly energy sources exceeds the continued growing need for electricity worldwide. In the previous year, the electricity range of nuclear power has grown by 69 terawatt hours – or 2.5 percent – worldwide – especially because of new nuclear capacities in China and the French nuclear reactors, which, according to the extreme lack of water, had to be sealed less frequently last year. However, the increase was low in 2024: plus 1.4 percent worldwide, which finally brought the climate -damaging CO2 emissions to a new global record high of plus 1.6 percent – and the Paris climate goals further out of reach. The main driver of the fossil energy requirement in many countries was climate change – the increasing number of heat waves that caused a higher electricity requirement due to climate -sounding. The operation of artificial intelligence, data center, electric vehicles and heat pumps would have increased global electricity demand by 0.7 percent. Tendency: continue to grow. Your share has doubled in just five years. Despite the significantly increasing electricity requirement worldwide and the new uncertainties through the fossil-friendly energy policy in the USA, ember director Phil Macdonald sees the turn on the electricity market as inevitable: “The era of fossil growth comes to an end.”
