We’ve all heard it: the clean-energy transition is crawling along while coal, oil and gas keep the lights on. It’s a neat line—and a misleading one. Compared with past energy upheavals (muscle to wood, wood to coal, coal to oil), this shift is moving at record speed because the technology is now cheap, reliable and fast to roll out. Build solar, wind and batteries, and they immediately start squeezing fossil generation out of the system. Economics is doing the heavy lifting, not wishful thinking.
From tinkering to tipping point
Early growth in any breakthrough looks underwhelming—think the internet in 1984. Clean energy followed that arc: small, experimental, then suddenly everywhere as costs plunged and the ecosystem matured. By the 2010s, solar and wind became bargain-basement; batteries joined late in the decade; and in the 2020s, EVs began their own price slide. Policy didn’t lead so much as catch up, with the Paris Agreement setting the tone and direction.
Five signs the shift is real—and rapid
- Investment has flipped the script. In 2025, clean energy investment is set to reach A$3.3 trillion—roughly double fossil investment and more than four times what it was a decade ago. That’s not a sideshow; that’s the main act.
- Build rates are smashing records. The world added >585 GW of wind and solar across 2024–25, the kind of volume that changes grids, not just headlines.
- Solar on top, batteries rising fast. Solar is now the fastest-growing energy source on the planet, and storage is lining up for its own surge as prices keep easing.
- Clean is out-building fossil three to one. Across China, the EU, the US, India and Australia, new solar and wind beat new coal, oil and gas by at least 3:1; in 2024, they were three-quarters of all new electricity capacity.
- Emerging economies are leaping ahead. Nearly 90% of new-energy finance in developing nations goes to renewables. Pakistan has imported solar equal to its national grid capacity in just five years. In sub-Saharan Africa, solar imports are booming; Sierra Leone now gets >60% of its power capacity from solar.
EVs nibble at oil; Australia sprints on renewables
By the end of 2024, about 58 million battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles were on the road, avoiding more than 250 million litres of oil every day. At home, we’ve been slow off the line on EVs, yes—but Australia is roaring on renewables: from roughly 21% of electricity in 2020 to nearly double five years later.
Demand up, emissions down (where clean dominates)
Electricity demand is still rising, yet emissions are flattening—falling fastest where renewables are densest. In China, the world’s biggest power market, clean capacity is arriving so quickly that power-sector emissions are now declining even as GDP grows. China’s dominance in clean-tech manufacturing feeds that flywheel.
The S-curve moment
New tech adoption crawls, hits a knee in the curve, then rockets. Solar, EVs and grid batteries have reached that knee—or blasted past it—in multiple markets. As costs keep dropping, they don’t just add capacity; they push fossil fuel out. The UK shut its last coal plant in 2024, with emissions now >50% below 1990 levels; in Poland, coal supplied less than half of electricity for the first time this year.
What the next few years look like
The modelling says the tipping point has landed. Expect cheap, abundant renewables—firmed by storage—to outcompete ever more fossil capacity. Energy underpins everything, and electricity is its most versatile form; if we can make it cheaply and reliably (we can), the rest follows.
Don’t buy the “too slow” narrative
Calling clean energy “incremental” is the oldest trick for belittling rising tech. Meanwhile, new fossil projects look riskier by the quarter; capital is flooding into renewables because the economics stack up. For years, even conservative forecasters have undercooked solar’s real growth. There’s plenty of work ahead and vested interests won’t roll over—but ignoring the momentum is missing the story. The progress is real, and it’s accelerating.
Article adapted from: The Conversation - Climate action can feel slow – but the fastest energy leap in history has begun