In China, sources of electricity that don’t involve fossil fuels — which includes solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear and biomass energy — have grown by 2.8 times over the past decade.
That has been driven mainly by a tenfold expansion in wind and solar power. India has also seen a massive surge in green energy — although at a slower rate than China.
“For the first time, China’s clean-energy growth, especially solar and wind, has been big enough to cover all of the growth in electricity demand and energy demand,” says Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Helsinki.
China and India are not alone: the money spent on technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and batteries is surging around the globe.
The upshot is that clean-energy technologies account for the bulk of new energy investments, and that is the first step in the fight against climate change.
“Every unit of renewable energy that is used instead of coal is a good thing,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organization in California that tracks global temperatures.
But fossil fuels remain a cornerstone of the global economy. Over the past five years, there has been a small but steady upwards trend in investments in fossil-fuel infrastructure that is designed to last for decades, and direct government investments in fossil fuels still outstrip those that flow into clean energy.