Renewable energy surge: why Science named it 2025’s Breakthrough of the Year
The journal Science named the renewable energy surge its Breakthrough of the Year. The choice reflects a simple, measurable shift: clean electricity has started to grow fast enough to match the world’s rising power demand.
The catch is that the next stage is no longer mainly a technology story. It is a build-out and integration story—transmission lines, transformers, batteries, permitting, and market rules that pay for flexibility.
This piece explains what crossed the line in 2025, why the surge accelerated, and where it can stall. It also lays out three scenarios for what happens next as governments and utilities try to turn a milestone into a durable trend.
The story turns on whether the renewable energy surge can outrun the grid, storage, and political bottlenecks that still protect fossil power.
Key Points
Science named the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year because renewables began to eclipse coal on key measures of electricity generation.
In January–June 2025, renewables generated 5,072 TWh globally, edging past coal at 4,896 TWh—the first time on record.
In the same period, global electricity demand rose by 369 TWh; solar added 306 TWh and wind added 97 TWh, covering the entire demand increase.
Power-sector emissions were roughly flat despite higher demand, highlighting how fast clean generation is scaling.
Storage and grid equipment are now the pacing items: battery spending for power-sector storage is about $66 billion in 2025, but transformers, cables, and interconnection queues are slowing projects.
Coal is still entrenched: global coal demand hit a record in 2025, showing that electricity milestones do not automatically translate into lower fossil use everywhere.
Background: Renewable energy surge
For years, renewables grew quickly yet remained additive: they expanded, but fossil generation also expanded as demand rose. In 2025, the arithmetic changed. Solar and wind did not just grow; they grew enough to cover new demand in the first half of the year, allowing fossil generation to stop rising simply to keep up.
The change is not evenly distributed. Rapid build-out in China and India has carried much of the global increase. Elsewhere, weather-driven dips in wind and hydro, transmission constraints, and faster demand growth have still pulled gas and coal into the mix.
Two forces are pulling the surge forward. First is cost: solar modules and batteries have become cheap enough that clean power competes on price, not only on climate goals. Second is security: rooftop solar and small batteries are spreading because they reduce exposure to fuel shocks and outages, especially in places where grids are stressed.
Analysis
Political and Geopolitical Dimensions
The renewable energy surge is turning clean-tech supply chains into strategic assets. Countries want low-cost imports to move fast, but they also want domestic manufacturing and less dependency on single suppliers. That tension is producing tariffs, domestic-content rules, and subsidy races—policies that can speed deployment at home while slowing it globally.
Energy security cuts both ways. Renewables reduce the need for imported fuels, but they increase reliance on imported hardware and minerals. As clean power scales, geopolitical leverage shifts from oil and gas flows toward control over panels, batteries, transformers, and the materials that feed them.
Economic and Market Impact
Capital is following the new economics. Global investment in solar—utility-scale and rooftop—is expected to reach about $450 billion in 2025. Electricity-sector investment overall is about $1.5 trillion in 2025, outpacing spending on fossil-fuel supply.
The market is also learning new pain points. When solar floods the grid at midday, prices can collapse; when the sun sets, flexibility becomes valuable. Regions with good market design will reward storage, demand response, and fast-ramping capacity. Regions without it risk boom-and-bust cycles where projects get built but revenue becomes uncertain.
The grid is the clearest mismatch. Roughly $400 billion a year is spent on grids worldwide versus about $1 trillion on generation assets. Permitting delays, transformer and cable shortages, and weak utility finances—especially in developing economies—are turning cheap power into slow power.
Technological and Security Implications
The breakthrough is not a single new panel. It is the ability to integrate variable generation at scale. Batteries are central: global spending on batteries for power-sector storage is about $66 billion in 2025, and demand is rising as data centers and electrification increase peak loads.
Policy and market rules now decide whether batteries sit idle or behave like infrastructure. Recent reforms in China’s power market have improved the economics of operating storage, helping to pull batteries from pilots into routine grid balancing. At the same time, the rapid expansion of storage manufacturing is tightening the link between clean energy and industrial policy.
As grids digitize to manage fluctuations, cyber resilience becomes a reliability requirement, not a niche concern. The fastest transition is the one that does not create new single points of failure in software, communications, or imported components.
Three Scenarios for What Happens Next
Scenario 1: The build-out supercycle. Trigger: faster permitting and a sharp rise in grid spending, especially for transmission and transformers. Beneficiaries: early-moving utilities, storage and grid-equipment suppliers, and regions that can finance rapid deployment. First visible sign: interconnection queues shrink and multi-year transmission projects start meeting deadlines.
Scenario 2: The bottleneck backlash. Trigger: persistent grid delays and policy whiplash that raises the cost of capital. Beneficiaries: incumbent gas plants and any technology positioned as firm capacity. First visible sign: higher curtailment, more emergency capacity payments, and canceled renewable auctions.
Scenario 3: A fractured transition. Trigger: escalating trade barriers and competing blocs for clean-tech manufacturing and critical minerals. Beneficiaries: protected domestic manufacturers and resource-holding countries with bargaining power. First visible sign: new rounds of tariffs and export controls paired with subsidy races for factories and mines.
What Most Coverage Misses
The constraint has moved from invention to delivery. In many places, the limiting factor is no longer the cost of generating a kilowatt-hour; it is the ability to connect projects, move power across regions, and pay for flexibility when weather changes.
That is how the world can see renewables edge past coal in electricity generation while coal demand still hits records. Without transmission, storage, and durable policy, fossil plants remain the backstop—even in grids adding solar at record pace.
Why This Matters
For households, the surge can mean lower wholesale prices where clean power and grids scale together. It can also mean fewer fuel-driven price spikes, because sunlight and wind do not arrive with an invoice.
For industry, the stakes are bigger. Cheap, abundant electricity attracts manufacturing, electrified industrial processes, and compute-heavy projects. Regions that can build grids and storage faster will win investment; regions that cannot will pay higher reliability costs and risk losing jobs.
Three indicators will show whether 2025 was a threshold or a turning point: grid investment catching up with generation, storage deployments accelerating as standard practice, and coal plant approvals slowing in the markets where coal is still treated as reliability insurance.
Real-World Impact
A small manufacturer in Punjab installs rooftop solar to stabilize costs and avoid outages. The savings are real, but the business still depends on local rules for net metering and import duties on panels.
A data center developer in Northern Virginia orders battery banks and power equipment to manage peaks. The project competes with utilities and renewables developers for scarce transformers and switchgear.
A transmission planner in Arizona faces lawsuits over a new high-voltage line needed to connect solar-rich areas to growing cities. Without the line, the region curtails clean generation while paying gas plants to stand by.
Conclusion
Science’s Breakthrough of the Year label fits because 2025 marked a shift in pace: in the first half of the year, renewables generated 5,072 TWh versus coal’s 4,896 TWh, and solar plus wind growth covered the world’s demand increase.
The next phase is less about new inventions and more about finishing the job: grid build-out, storage at scale, and policies that stay consistent long enough for capital to commit. The clearest sign the story is breaking the right way is mundane: shorter interconnection times, faster transformer deliveries, and batteries becoming routine on new grids—not a one-off headline.
