New Delhi: While renewable electricity generation has continued to grow as the world transitions away from fossil fuels, the speed of the transition may not be as fast as one had hoped, said Ita Kettleborough, director of the Energy Transitions Commission.
He pointed out that this comes despite the “significant decrease in the cost of generating clean energy.”
The Energy Transitions Commission is a UK-based think-tank focused on economic growth and climate change mitigation. It is currently working in India to expand the use of clean electricity in the agricultural sector, in cooperation with the Energy and Resources Institute.
“There has been a notable decline in the cost of generating clean energy, especially in solar and wind,” Kettleborough said. “For example, in the case of solar, there has been a 99 percent reduction in the cost over the last 30 years. But the use of fossil fuels has not declined as quickly as we had hoped.”
An analysis by the Energy 2025 Institute, the global professional body for the energy sector, revealed that while wind and solar power alone expanded by a staggering 16% in 2024, total fossil fuel use grew by more than 1%, highlighting the slow progress of the energy transition.
The continued use of fossil fuels leads to record emissions every year. For example, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels are expected to increase by 1.1 percent in 2025 to reach a record level, according to a study by the Global Carbon Project.
“While we now have clean energy technologies to address the challenge of climate change, we needed them 20 years ago, and perhaps even earlier. We are still struggling to move at the same pace.” [in deploying these technologies] “We need to… I’m confident we’ll get to that pace by the end of the century, but we need to get there much faster than that,” Kettleborough said.
The world needs to rapidly expand renewable energy generation, as its carbon budget to limit global warming to the 1.5°C threshold has been “virtually exhausted,” leaving only about 170 billion tons of carbon dioxide remaining, equivalent to about four years of emissions at current levels, according to the Global Carbon Project study. The study added that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is expected to reach 425.7 parts per million in 2025, 52% higher than pre-industrial levels.
Once the 1.5°C threshold is exceeded for an extended period of time, the impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise, severe floods and droughts, and wildfires will increase and accelerate dramatically.
The world is already seeing these consequences, to some extent. For example, the last three years were the hottest years on record, sea surface temperatures were abnormally high, and extreme weather events became more severe.
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