It is two years since I reviewed the BBC’s enthusiastic narrative around Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2023. I don’t know what happened last year or how and why I missed it, but with the release of Ember’s latest review it’s time to take another look.

As I pointed out two years ago, Ember are a campaigning organisation with an agenda, though the BBC preferred to describe them as “energy analysts”. Whilst technically true, to refer to them thus without adding in the fact that they are heavily invested in the climate crisis narrative, as are many of their funders, the BBC description might be considered a little economical with the truth. This time round the BBC has chosen to describe Ember as a “think-tank”. I take little, if any, issue with the BBC report, the headline to which (“Clean energy’s share of world’s electricity reaches 40%, report says”) accurately and non-sensationally summarises the main point Ember seeks to make in its report. Bizarrely, Reuters’ version runs with a headline which doesn’t seem to be accurate: “Renewables provided record 32% of global electricity in 2024, Ember says”).

Unusually too, the Guardian’s report is perhaps a little less enthusiastic than I might have expected, and even contains some downbeat commentary:

Overall, solar power remains a relatively small part of the global energy system. It made up almost 7% of the world’s electricity last year, according to Ember, while wind power made up just over 8% of the global power system.

The fast-growing technologies remain dwarfed by hydro power, which has remained relatively steady in recent years, and made up 14% of the world’s electricity in 2024.

And:

…Ember had previously predicted that 2023 would be the year in which emissions from electricity reached a peak, after a plateau in the first half of the year.

Climate experts hoped then that emissions would begin to fall, but a series of heatwaves across the globe ignited a surge in demand for electricity to power air conditioning and refrigeration systems, which caused fuel electricity to grow by 1.4% that year.

The report, which accounted for 93% of the global electricity market across 88 countries, found that the surge in demand pushed emissions from the global power sector up by 1.6% to an all-time high last year.

And a look at Ember’s report confirms that things aren’t going quite so well as Ember’s previous reports might have led us to believe would be the case, and the Guardian’s downbeat information is confirmed by the report:

In 2024, global fossil generation increased by 245 TWh (+1.4%) – comparable to the increases of 246 TWh in 2023 and 201 TWh in 2022. This rise in fossil generation led to a 1.6% increase in global power sector emissions (+223 million tonnes of CO2), which reached a record high of 14.6 billion tonnes of CO2. However, Ember’s analysis shows that fossil generation rose primarily as a result of hotter temperatures compared to 2023.

I love that. Blame it on the heat. Ember claimed that these emissions should have peaked by now, they believe that climate change means it’s getting hotter, but when emissions didn’t peak as expected, it’s because it’s, er, getting hotter, as expected. Then we get what’s pretty much a re-run of their findings two years ago. The reality is that nothing’s changing:

The world’s three largest power consumers – China, India and the US – saw an increase in fossil generation in 2024, while the world’s fourth largest, the EU, saw a decline.

China was still the country with the largest increase in fossil generation, but – despite the impacts of heatwaves – 2024’s growth of 116 TWh was less than a third of its 2023 increase (+367 TWh) and only half its average annual increase over the last five years (+218 TWh).

India’s fossil generation grew by 67 TWh in 2024, significantly lower than the 124 TWh increase recorded in 2023 and the country’s lowest increase since the rebound after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Actually, one thing is changing. Growing demand for fossil fuels in the USA can be added to the ongoing demand in (inter alia) China and India:

Driven by a rise in electricity demand, the US also saw an increase in fossil generation (+34 TWh) in 2024. Gas generation rose significantly, as coal saw a moderate fall. This represents a rebound from 2023 which saw a year-on-year decline in fossil generation amid falling demand. US gas generation growth was equivalent to 57% of the global increase in gas generation in 2024. Despite record clean electricity growth, the US has now recorded an increase in fossil generation in three out of the last four years.

Ember is massively enthusiastic about the potential for solar and battery storage to transform the situation and to enable renewables to continue to grow at a rapid rate. And they may well be correct in this, but the problem is while some of the developed world (probably no longer including the USA) seeks to “decarbonise”, this necessarily involves greater electricity demand, which the growth in renewables will struggle to meet. More to the point, perhaps, there is a growing global demand for more energy, which is higher than previously forecast (isn’t it always?):

The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) current outlooks for future electricity demand envisage higher levels of demand growth than was previously expected. The IEA’s STEPS scenario released in October 2024 forecasts annual demand growth of 3.3% between 2023 and 2030, higher than the 2.7% growth they forecast in 2023 between 2022 and 2030. The upgrade to 3.3% annual growth equates to an additional 1,687 TWh of annual electricity demand by 2030, with the IEA citing increased expectations for demand from data centres as well as increased power usage for cooling, alongside electric mobility and light industrial consumption.

More recent analyses point to even faster growth. In February 2025, the IEA published a a short-term forecast for the years 2025-2027, in which total generation is expected to increase by an average of 3.7% annually.

Ember also highlights uncertainties with regard to expectations of demand growth and with regard to renewables’ ability to meet the growing demand (they continue to believe it will, even though their past predictions in this regard have consistently proved to be wrong). This little snippet is particularly interesting:

Weather conditions can also impact the supply of clean generation: wind and hydro conditions in 2024 were both below the long-term average. If global weather conditions in 2024 had been in line with the five-year average, wind generation would have been 3.7% higher (+92 TWh) and hydro generation would have been 2% higher (+86 TWh). How these factors interact in the coming years will significantly determine the scale of fossil generation declines.

If, as some believe, hydropower will be constrained by more frequent droughts, and wind power will be constrained by declining wind speeds, then Ember’s optimistic outlook will prove once again to be too optimistic. It will also cast doubt on the wisdom of continuing to hurtle down the renewables road. Indeed, in Europe last year, wind generation struggled:

Wind generation growth was more modest in Europe in 2024 than in 2023, with Germany and France seeing falls of 4 and 5 TWh respectively. Although capacity additions continued in 2024 in these countries, less favourable wind conditions than in 2023 led to lower-than-expected generation.

I have to keep reminding myself that the Ember report is about the sources of electricity generation, and the levels of electricity generated and predicted to be generated, rather than about fossil fuel emissions generally. And so, while it is – with reason – hugely enthusiastic about the significant growth in renewables in China and India, the fact remains that this is not having the effect of preventing increased fossil fuel use in both of those countries:

India’s electricity demand has tripled in the last two decades, while China’s has quadrupled. Fast paced clean electricity deployment is now breaking a long-term trend, as fossil generation is no longer growing at the same rate as electricity demand. This decoupling is happening because a growing share of demand growth is being met by an expansion of clean sources rather than fossil generation.

It would be truly astonishing (and terrifying for those who believe in a climate crisis caused by humankind’s use of fossil fuels) if the demand for fossil fuels was growing as quickly in China and India as their demand for electricity is growing. Yet the fact remains that demand for fossil fuels is increasing in both of those countries, with a view to generating electricity and for use other than with regard to generating electricity. For instance, the International Energy Agency (not my favourite source for information, but one which can be relied on not to downplay the success of renewables) tells us that in 2022 coal generated 61% of China’s total energy supply, while oil supplied 17.9% and natural gas supplied 7.8%. It also tells us that in 2022 coal generated 46% of India’s total energy supply, oil supplied 20.4% and natural gas supplied 5%. And while the Asia Natural Gas & Energy Association might be just as agenda-driven as Ember, it tells us:

India faces a significant challenge to transition to a low carbon energy future. The world’s sixth largest economy is still dependent on fossil fuels for more than 88% of its primary energy needs.

India overtook China as the world’s most populous country in 2023 and its energy consumption is forecast to nearly double by 2040. The steep growth curve reflects a continued rise in energy needs per capita as wealth grows with development. Currently, India’s per capita energy use is around one third of the global average.

The country has the world’s fifth largest reserves of coal which continues to dominate the country’s primary energy mix (55%), mainly used for power generation – coal supplied more than 75 per cent of India’s electricity in 2023.

Do we trust S&P Global to be completely disinterested and to offer more accurate forecasts than Ember? I don’t know, but they don’t have a particularly optimistic outlook with regard to fossil fuel emissions in 2025. This (“2025 Energy Outlook: Surging primary demand to outpace clean energy growth”) was written just four months ago:

Global primary energy demand is set to rise by over 8 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2025, outstripping clean energy growth and increasing greenhouse gas emissions…

The outlook identifies 10 key themes to track, leading with the re-election of Donald Trump as US President and ranging from the impact of data centers on power demand to the possible peaking of global gasoline demand….

….An anticipated surge in primary demand is not matched by clean energy supply, leading to an expected rise in fossil fuel consumption by over 3 million boe/d, the outlook says.

This imbalance will likely push CO2 emissions to new heights, albeit at the smallest increase rate since the pandemic, it says.

“While the supply of clean energy is growing faster than it ever has in history (over 5 million boe/d), it is not yet fast enough to curtail the growth in fossil fuel demand, let alone displace existing fossil fuel consumption,” it says….

The reference to President Trump is intriguing. Four months on, with the markets in tariff-driven turmoil, I wonder if their analysis has altered? If the developed world (especially the USA) buys solar panels from China in smaller numbers than to date, will manufacturing in Europe and the US step up to the plate, or will the rapid growth of solar go into decline everywhere except in China?

India is certainly investing in renewables, but still we find this (within the Ember report):

India’s coal-fired power generation also continued to rise, almost doubling from 2012 (787 TWh) to 2024 (1,534 TWh). In 2018, India overtook the US to become the second-largest coal generator, and now has more than twice the coal generation of the US.

As a result, power sector emissions continue to rise, reaching 1,457 MtCO2 in 2024. This makes India the world’s third-largest power sector emitter, although emissions per capita remain well below the global average.

In any event, the bottom line remains that for all the growth of renewables in generating electricity globally, electricity as a proportion of global energy isn’t growing very quickly at all. To the best of my knowledge we await a 2025 review of World Energy in 2024 by the Energy Institute, but we do have the 2024 review of the 2023 statistics. This tells us that:

Total primary energy consumption increased by 2% over its 2022 level, 0.6% above its ten-year average and over 5% above its 2019 pre-COVID level.

Fossil fuel consumption as a percentage of primary energy dropped 0.4% to 81.5%.

…consumption of crude oil broke through the 100 million barrels per day level for the first time ever and coal demand beat the previous year’s record level.

Ember’s conclusions are the same as in previous years (remember that their track record for making predictions isn’t great). I love the whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up, given that fossil fuels continue to be used to generate more electricity than ever, while fossil fuel use as a proportion of primary energy is declining at a rate that suggests we will still be using fossil fuels in large amounts in 2100, never mind 2050:

Any near-term increases in fossil fuel generation should not be mistaken for failure of the energy transition. As we pass the tipping point where clean generation structurally outpaces demand growth, any changes to fossil fuel generation over the short-term will mostly reflect fluctuations in weather, as seen in 2024 with the impacts of heatwaves. But while changes in fossil generation in the short-term may be noisy, the direction and ultimate destination are unmistakable. The global energy transition is no longer a question of if, but how fast.

Of course it’s possible that they may be correct, but since to date they usually aren’t, my money is on their conclusions proving to be hopelessly optimistic. I’ll try to remember to re-visit the subject this time next year.