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Here’s some good news: Clean power met all electricity demand growth last year for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s according to a new report on global electricity trends from Ember, a U.K. think tank that tracks energy data from around the world. The new review suggests that solar and batteries are continuing to remake the global power system — and outcompeting gas and coal in some of the world’s fastest growing economies.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Nicholas Fulghum, the lead author of Ember’s new report and an energy and climate data analyst at the think tank. They discuss why solar keeps breaking records, whether India’s energy development trajectory has changed, and how the Iran War could change this year’s numbers.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Nicholas Fulghum: It’s not just the absolute growth there. It’s just also the speed of growth that we’re not really expecting from sources in the past. Usually when a source scales to this level, where you have a maturing technology that is dominating parts of the market, the growth rates come down. But with solar, what we’ve seen is that actually 2025 had the highest growth rate, with 30%, that we’ve seen in eight years. And that’s quite unusual for something that’s really reached scale.
Robinson Meyer: Why is it dominating now? Because you’re absolutely right, we’ve been talking about the story for so many years in a row. This is the one thing we’ve come to expect about the electricity system globally, is that we’re just going to add all this solar every year. So why did it accelerate last year?
Nicholas Fulghum: The solar story as a whole is essentially a story of technology, and the learning curve that solar has been on hasn’t really stopped. So we’re still seeing cost declines. And they are really accelerating the deployment further.
If you think about where the cost has come from, we have a decline of about 90% over the last decade. It really just completely changes the use cases and where solar is applicable. We now have seen rapid solar buildout in so many different contexts. We’ve seen it in big utility installations in the U.S. We’ve seen the sort of hybrid deployment that we see in Australia, where it’s both utility-scale and distributed. Same, very similar approach in Germany, as well, a mix between utility and distributed. But we’ve also seen the very grassroots, not very organized but equally rapid deployment in countries like Pakistan. And this versatility is not something that is applicable to any other electricity source — not just now, but in history.
You can find a complete transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026
Previously on Shift Key: Nobody in the West Knows How to Respond to the ‘Electrotech Revolution’
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
