Renewable energy hits global tipping point for even lower costs, UN says
Last year, 74 percent of the growth in electricity generated worldwide was from wind, solar and other green sources, according to a report compiled by multiple United Nations agencies called Seizing the Moment of Opportunity. It was published on Tuesday.
It found that 92.5 percent of all new electricity capacity added to the grid worldwide in 2024 came from renewables. Meanwhile, sales of electric vehicles were up from 500,000 in 2015 to more than 17 million in 2024.
The three cheapest electricity sources globally last year were onshore wind, solar panels and new hydropower, according to an energy cost report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental organisation. Solar power now is 41 percent cheaper and wind power is 53 percent cheaper globally than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, the reports said.
'The fossil fuel age is flailing and failing,' UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a speech at the UN headquarters in New York City.
'We are in the dawn of a new energy era. An era where cheap, clean, abundant energy powers a world rich in economic opportunity.'
'Just follow the money,' Guterres said, quoting the reports, which showed last year there was $2 trillion in investment in green energy, which is about $800bn more than in fossil fuels.
Renewables are booming despite fossil fuels getting nearly nine times the government consumption subsidies as they do, Guterres and the reports said.
In 2023, global fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $620bn, compared with $70bn for renewables, the UN report said.
Still, the UN warned that the switch to renewable energy is not happening fast enough.
Despite the boom in renewables, fossil fuel production globally is still increasing instead of going down in response. UN officials said that's because power demand is increasing overall, spurred by developing countries, artificial intelligence data centres and the need for cooling in an ever warmer world.
Guterres warned nations that are hanging on to fossil fuels that they were heading down a dangerous path that would make them poorer not richer.
'Countries that cling to fossil fuels are not protecting their economies. They [are] sabotaging them – driving up costs, undermining competitiveness, locking in stranded assets,' Guterres said.
The global renewables growth has been mostly in countries like China – where one-tenth of the economy is tied up in green energy – as well as countries such as India and Brazil.
Africa represented less than 2 percent of the new green energy capacity installed last year despite having great electrification needs, the reports said.
'The Global South must be empowered to generate its own electricity without adding to already unsustainable level of debts,' Bahamian climate scientist Adelle Thomas of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who did not work on the reports, told The Associated Press news agency.
Guterres called on major technology firms to power data centres completely with renewables by 2030.
'A typical AI data centre eats up as much electricity as 100,000 homes,' Guterres said. 'By 2030, data centres could consume as much electricity as all of Japan does today.'
'The future is being built in the cloud,' the UN chief said.
'It must be powered by the sun, the wind and the promise of a better world.'
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Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States towards China has evolved from economic cooperation to outright antagonism. US media outlets and politicians have engaged in persistent anti-China rhetoric, while the US government has imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on China and pursued military build-up close to Chinese territory. Washington wants people to believe that China poses a threat. China's rise indeed threatens US interests, but not in the way the US political elite seeks to frame it. The US relationship with China needs to be understood in the context of the capitalist world system. Capital accumulation in the core states, often glossed as the 'Global North', depends on cheap labour and cheap resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, the so-called 'Global South'. This arrangement is crucial to ensuring high profits for the multinational firms that dominate global supply chains. 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Higher wages in China impose a constraint on the profits of Western firms that operate there or that depend on Chinese manufacturing for intermediate parts and other key inputs. The other problem, for the core states, is that the increase in China's wages and prices is reducing its exposure to unequal exchange. During the low-wage era of the 1990s, China's export-to-import ratio with the core was extremely high. In other words, China had to export very large quantities of goods in order to obtain necessary imports. Today, this ratio is much lower, representing a dramatic improvement in China's terms of trade, substantially reducing the core's ability to appropriate value from China. Given all this, capitalists in the core states are now desperate to do something to restore their access to cheap labour and resources. One option – increasingly promoted by the Western business press – is to relocate industrial production to other parts of Asia where wages are cheaper. 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This is what sustains the core's net-appropriation through unequal exchange. China's technological development is now breaking Western monopolies, and may give other developing countries alternative suppliers for necessary goods at more affordable prices. This poses a fundamental challenge to the imperial arrangement and unequal exchange. The US has responded by imposing sanctions designed to cripple China's technological development. So far, this has not worked; if anything, it has increased incentives for China to develop sovereign technological capacities. With this weapon mostly neutralised, the US wants to resort to warmongering, the main objective of which would be to destroy China's industrial base, and divert China's investment capital and productive capacities towards defence. The US wants to go to war with China not because China poses some kind of military threat to the American people, but because Chinese development undermines the interests of imperial capital. Western claims about China posing some kind of military threat are pure propaganda. The material facts tell a fundamentally different story. In fact, China's military spending per capita is less than the global average, and 1/10th that of the US alone. Yes, China has a big population, but even in absolute terms, the US-aligned military bloc spends over seven times more on military power than China does. The US controls eight nuclear weapons for every one that China has. China may have the power to prevent the US from imposing its will on it, but it does not have the power to impose its will on the rest of the world in the way that the core states do. The narrative that China poses some kind of military threat is wildly overblown. In fact, the opposite is true. The US has hundreds of military bases and facilities around the world. A significant number of them are stationed near China – in Japan and South Korea. By contrast, China has only one foreign military base, in Djibouti, and zero military bases near US borders. Furthermore, China has not fired a single bullet in international warfare in over 40 years, while during this time the US has invaded, bombed or carried out regime-change operations in over a dozen Global South countries. If there is any state that poses a known threat to world peace and security, it is the US. The real reason for Western warmongering is because China is achieving sovereign development and this is undermining the imperial arrangement on which Western capital accumulation depends. The West will not let global economic power slip from its hands so easily. The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
