Clean energy on the cusp of rolling back fossil fuels: Report

Experts say the world’s solar and wind investments have reached a tipping point in electricity supply – spelling doom for coal and gas.

Renewable energy will this year shrink fossil fuels’ reigning share of the global electricity market for the first time.

That is the key finding of Ember, a leading energy think tank based in London, which on Wednesday published its first comprehensive Global Electricity Review analysing data from 215 countries.

Thanks to the galloping pace of new solar and wind capacity, renewables have been claiming almost all growth in electricity demand for five years, leaving fossil fuels stagnant.

But this year, said Ember, they will also roll back fossil fuels’ market share by 2 percent – the beginning of a decade-long process of knocking them out of electricity production altogether in three dozen developed economies.

Renewables expanded by an average of 3.5 percent a year during the past decade, compared with an annual 1.5 percent in the previous decade, as prices for photovoltaic panels and wind turbines climbed down and their productivity soared.