These increases have driven the contribution of solar PV to the world’s total electricity mix from 15.2% in the first three quarters of 2024 to 17.6% in the same period of 2025, while the share of all renewables has increased from 32.5% to 34.2%.
In total, all “low-carbon sources”, which include all renewable energy sources plus nuclear, accounted for 43% of the world’s electricity generation in the first nine months of the year, up from 41.3% in the previous year.
A graph showing changes in electricity generation across markets and technologies. Image: Ember.
The graph above shows how China has been the driving force behind solar PV and wind generation growth, accounting for 280TWh and 102TWh, respectively, in the first nine months of the year.
Crucially, China also reduced fossil fuel generation by 52TWh compared to the previous year, suggesting a shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewables in even the world’s biggest industrial players.
The collective growth of wind and solar PV generation exceeded the rise in global electricity demand in January-September, and the report’s authors suggested that this demonstrates the ability of solar PV and wind to be a major contributor to meeting the world’s electricity demand moving forward.
“Record solar power growth and stagnating fossil fuels in 2025 show how clean power has become the driving force in the power sector,” said Nicolas Fulghum, a senior data analyst at Ember. “Historically a growth segment, fossil power now appears to be entering a period of stagnation and managed decline.
“China, the largest source of fossil growth, has turned a corner, signalling that reliance on fossil fuels to meet growing power demand is no longer required.”
Ember reports that in the first nine months of 2025, fossil fuel generation declined by 17TWh, a 0.1% decrease over the previous year, and it expects no growth in fossil fuel output for the entirety of 2025. This would end a trend of increasing fossil fuel generation seen each year since 2021, and would mark just the fourth year since the year 2000 that fossil fuel generation did not increase over the previous year.
The conclusions of the Ember report are more optimistic for the clean energy transition than those made by an International Energy Agency (IEA) report published yesterday. The IEA report found that while growing energy demand will increase opportunities for the renewable energy sector, a number of its scenarios show that oil will remain a key part of the world’s energy mix.
https://www.pv-tech.org/global-solar-generation-up-31-year-on-year-first-nine-months-2025/
