The age of electricity has officially arrived – here’s what the data shows
By Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi
Every year there’s a phrase that energy analysts reach for to summarise where things stand. This year, reading the International Energy Agency’s newly released Global Energy Review 2026, the phrase that keeps surfacing is “the Age of Electricity” and for once, it isn’t marketing language.
It’s a description of what the numbers actually did in 2025.
Electricity is now growing more than twice as fast as energy overall
Global energy demand grew by 1.3% in 2025, a genuine slowdown from 2024’s 2%. But global electricity demand grew by around 3%, more than twice that rate, adding roughly 800 terawatt-hours to the system. That gap between overall energy growth and electricity growth is the clearest single signal in the report: the world isn’t just using more energy, it’s converting more of its energy use into electrons specifically for vehicles, for heating and cooling, for industry, and increasingly for data centres.
That last category deserves its own mention. In the United States, data centres accounted for around half of all electricity demand growth in 2025, a trend the IEA’s own Energy and AI analysis had projected would persist through 2030. Electric vehicle charging demand grew even faster in percentage terms, up 38% year-on-year, though it remains a smaller slice of the total compared to data centres and conventional building and industrial demand.
The single most striking line in the report: solar PV was the largest contributor to global energy demand growth in 2025, meeting more than a quarter of the increase, the first time on record that any modern renewable source has topped that list. Solar’s generation increase of 600 terawatt-hours was the largest single-year jump from any electricity source in IEA records outside of post-crisis rebound years.
Zoom out further and the pattern holds: low-emissions sources, solar, wind, nuclear, hydropower and other renewables combined accounted for nearly 60% of total global energy demand growth in 2025. Renewable electricity generation now virtually matches generation from coal worldwide, and in the European Union, solar and wind together passed fossil fuels in the generation mix for the first time.
Here’s where the story resists a clean narrative. Global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by about 0.4% in 2025, the slowest growth rate since 2021 yet total emissions still reached a new all-time high of roughly 38.4 billion tonnes. Slower growth is not the same as decline, and the report is careful not to blur that distinction.
What’s notable is where that growth came from. For the first time since the 1990s, emissions in advanced economies grew faster than emissions in emerging market and developing economies 0.5% versus 0.3%. Much of that reversal traces back to weather: a colder winter pushed up natural gas use for heating in Europe and the United States, while an unusually strong, early monsoon in India reduced cooling demand enough that the country’s emissions were essentially flat for the first time outside a recession or oil-shock year.
One of the report’s more sobering findings is how much of 2025’s apparent progress was weather-assisted rather than structural. The IEA estimates that weather-related factors alone milder cooling needs in Asia, colder heating needs in the West, and drought conditions reducing hydropower output in Europe and Latin America — pushed emissions up by around 90 million tonnes globally, accounting for roughly half of the total combustion emissions increase. Strip out the weather effects, and advanced-economy emissions would have continued their long-term decline rather than ticking upward.
That’s a useful caution against reading any single year’s numbers as a verdict on the energy transition. 2025 was a year where genuinely structural shifts record renewable capacity additions, battery storage growing 40% in a single year, electric cars reaching one in four new car sales globally coexisted with a reminder that weather can still move the topline numbers more than policy did.
Perhaps the most useful figure in the entire report is this one: the rollout of solar PV, wind, nuclear, electric cars and heat pumps since 2019 has avoided more than 35 exajoules of fossil fuel demand annually equivalent to about 7% of global fossil fuel use and prevented roughly 3 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, around 8% of the global total. The avoided coal demand alone exceeds India’s entire annual coal consumption.
That’s not a projection. That’s what already happened, measured against a counterfactual without the technology rollout of the last six years. The Age of Electricity isn’t a slogan for where the energy system is heading. According to this year’s data, it’s already where the energy system is.
- Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi, CEO of Do Take Action, is an independent consultant on edtech, climate change, public policy, and women’s procurement empowerment
