The US is pushing gas as the world moves towards renewables

The amount of electricity and greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants is likely to peak in 2023, according to the annual global electricity review by energy think tank Ember. That means human civilization has likely passed a fundamental turning point, according to Ember: Countries will likely never generate as much electricity from fossil fuels again.

A record 30% of the world’s electricity came from renewable energy sources last year, thanks largely to the growth in solar and wind power. Starting this year, pollution from the energy sector is expected to begin to decline, with a 2% drop in the amount of electricity powered by fossil fuels projected for 2024 – a decline that Ember hopes to accelerate in the long term.

“The decline in emissions from the energy sector is now inevitable. 2023 was probably the tipping point – a huge turning point in the history of energy,” said Dave Jones, chief insights officer at Ember, in an emailed statement. “But the pace… depends on how quickly the renewable energy revolution continues.”

It’s a transition that could be happening much more quickly if it weren’t for the USA, which is already the country largest gas producer in the world, using record values of gas last year. Without the US, Ember concludes, electricity production from gas would have fallen globally in 2023. Global economies excluding the US managed to generate 62 terawatt-hours less gas-fired electricity last year compared to the year before . But the US increased its electricity production from gas by almost double that amount over the same period, plus 115TWh from gas in 2023.

A big part of the problem is that the US is replacing most of its aging power plants that run on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, with gas-fired plants rather than carbon pollution-free alternatives. “The U.S. is trading one fossil fuel for another,” Jones said. “After two decades of such heavy reliance on gas power, the U.S. has a long way to go to get to a truly clean energy system.”

The US gets just 23% of its electricity from renewable energy, according to Ember, falling below the global average of 30%.

“The outdated technologies of the last century can no longer compete with the exponential innovations and falling cost curves of renewables and storage,” said Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a communication sent by email.

Ember’s report closely tracks other predictions from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which classified the transition to clean energy as “unstoppable” in October. The AIE predict a peak in global demand for coal, gas and oil this decade (for all energy uses, not just electricity). It also projected that renewables would make up nearly 50% of the world’s electricity mix by 2030.