Renewable energy just broke a 100-year-old streak

The HighlightRenewable energy just broke a 100-year-old streakCoal’s century at the top of the world’s power mix is over.by Bryan WalshApr 28, 2026, 10:00 AM UTCShareGiftThe rest of the world is building solar farms and battery plants as fast as the supply chains allow. The United States is trying to run against a market it no longer controls. Ritesh Shukla/Getty ImagesBryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk.For more than a century, the world has run on coal.When Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electrical station in Lower Manhattan fired up in 1882, it ran on coal. Coal survived the oil era, the nuclear era, the dash for natural gas, and decades of back-and-forth climate policy. From the 1970s through the mid-2010s, coal supplied somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the planet’s electricity, a steady if sooty presence powering modern life.Good NewsA weekly dose of stories chronicling progress around the world.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Then last year, it lost the lead. According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, recently released in time for Earth Day, renewable sources produced 33.8 percent of the world’s electricity last year, compared to 33 percent for coal. It was the first time those two lines had crossed since 1919, when the global grid was still small enough to run mostly on hydropower.RelatedThe best thing you can do for the planet on Earth DayAs coal has declined — at least on a relative basis — the sun has risen. When the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, solar produced just 256 terawatt hours of electricity globally. Nuclear power plants, at the time, were pumping out about 10 times that, while wind was responsible for three times as much electricity as solar.A decade later, solar is producing 10 times more power: 2,778 TWh, roughly what the entire European Union consumes in a year. Its production has doubled in the past three years alone. For 21 years running, solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet. In 2025 it surpassed wind for the first time, and is now on pace to pass nuclear this year.RelatedEven solar energy’s biggest fans are underestimating itWhile the world still burns a huge amount of coal — some 8.8 billion tonnes in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) — solar alone covered 75 percent of the rise in global electricity demand. Put wind and solar together, and you’ve met 99 percent of it. Fossil fuel power generation — coal, oil, and gas combined — fell 0.2 percent in 2025, the first decline since the pandemic and only the fifth year this century that fossil generation didn’t rise.Clean sources are now growing fast enough, on their own, to absorb just about everything the world is adding to its grid. And there’s a decent chance that, thanks in part to what’s happening right now in the Middle East, that transition may speed up.Why solar is no flukeIt all starts with cost.Solar module prices have fallen roughly 75 percent every decade for more than 40…

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