news
Nearly 64% of the new renewable electricity capacity in 2024 was in China, according to last Wednesday’s report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), The Associated Press reports. Overall, the world added 585 gigawatts (that’s 585 billion watts) of new renewable electrical energy, a 15.1% jump from 2023, with 46% of the world’s electricity now coming from solar, wind, and other green non-nuclear energy sources.
But even that big jump does not put the globe on track to reach the international goal of tripling renewable energy from 2023 to 2030, with the world on pace to be 28% short, IRENA calculated. The goal was adopted at the COP28 climate summit in 2023 as part of the world’s efforts to curb the increasing impacts of climate change and speed up the shift off fossil fuels.
“Renewable energy is powering down the fossil fuel age. Record-breaking growth is creating jobs, lowering energy bills, and cleaning our air,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “But the shift to clean energy must be faster and fairer.”
China added almost 374 gigawatts of renewable power—three quarters of it from solar—in 2024. That’s more than eight times as much as the United States delivered, and five times what Europe added last year.
China now has nearly 887 gigawatts of solar panel power, compared to 176 in the United States, nearly 90 in Germany, 21 in France, and more than 17 in the United Kingdom.
Read the full post at The Energy Mix.
