Renewable Energy

Since the Industrial Revolution, the energy mix of most countries across the world has become dominated by fossil fuels. This has major implications for the global climate, as well as for human health. Three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions result from the burning of fossil fuels for energy. Fossil fuels are responsible for large amounts of local air pollution – a health problem that leads to at least 5 million premature deaths each year.

To reduce CO 2 emissions and local air pollution, the world needs to rapidly shift towards low-carbon sources of energy – nuclear and renewable technologies.

Renewable energy will play a key role in decarbonizing our energy systems in the coming decades. But how rapidly is our production of renewable energy changing? What technologies look most promising in transforming our energy mix?

In this article we look at the data on renewable energy technologies across the world; what share of energy they account for today, and how quickly this is changing.

We often hear about the rapid growth of renewable technologies in media reports. But how much of an impact has this growth had on our energy systems?

In this interactive chart, we see the share of primary energy that came from renewable technologies – the combination of hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and modern biofuels. Traditional biomass – which can be an important energy source in lower-income settings is not included.

Note that this data measures primary energy in terms of total energy supply . For more details, read how primary energy measurement has changed across our charts .

Note that this is based on renewable energy's share in the energy mix. Energy consumption represents the sum of electricity, transport, and heating. We look at the electricity mix later in this article.

In the charts shown here, we look at the breakdown of renewable technologies by their components – hydropower, solar, wind, and others.

The first chart shows this as a stacked area chart, which allows us to more readily see the breakdown of the renewable mix and the relative contribution of each. The second chart is shown as a line chart, allowing us to see more clearly how each source is changing over time.

Globally we see that hydropower is the largest modern renewable source. However, we also see wind and solar power both growing rapidly.

In the sections above we looked at the role of renewables in the total energy mix . This includes not only electricity but also transport and heating. Electricity forms only one component of energy consumption.

Since transport and heating tend to be harder to decarbonize – they are more reliant on oil and gas – renewables tend to have a higher share in the electricity mix versus the total energy mix.

Hydroelectric power has been one of our oldest and largest sources of low-carbon energy. Hydroelectric generation at scale dates back more than a century, and is still our largest renewable source – excluding traditional biomass, it still accounts for around 40% of renewable generation.

However, the scale of hydroelectric power generation varies significantly across the world. This interactive chart shows its contribution by country.