The United States supports gas as the world moves toward renewable energy

The amount of electricity and greenhouse gas emissions generated by fossil fuel power plants will likely peak in 2023, according to the annual Global Review of Electricity conducted by energy research firm Ember. This means that human civilization has likely passed a major turning point, according to Imber: Countries will likely never generate as much electricity from fossil fuels again.

A record 30 percent of the world’s electricity came from renewable energy sources last year, thanks primarily to the growth of solar and wind power. Starting this year, pollution from the energy sector will likely start to decline, with a 2% decline in the amount of fossil-fueled electricity expected for 2024 – a decline that Ember expects to accelerate in the long term.

“A decline in energy sector emissions is now inevitable. 2023 is likely to be the pivot point – a major turning point in energy history,” Dave Jones, director of Ember Insights, said in an emailed statement. “But the pace … It depends on how quickly the renewables revolution continues.”

It’s a transformation that could have happened much faster if it weren’t for the United States, which is already in place The largest gas producer in the world, Using standard quantities Gas last year. Imber believes that without the United States, gas-fired electricity generation would have declined globally in 2023. Global economies, excluding the United States, generated 62 terawatt-hours less gas-fired electricity last year than the year before. But the United States boosted gas electricity generation by nearly twice that amount in the same time frame, an additional 115 terawatt hours of gas in 2023.

A big part of the problem is that the United States is replacing most of its old power plants that run on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, with gas-fired plants rather than carbon-free alternatives. “The United States is replacing one fossil fuel with another,” Jones said. “After two decades of heavy reliance on gas power, the United States has a long way to go to achieve a truly clean energy system.”

The United States gets just 23% of its electricity from renewable energy, according to Ember, which is lower than the global average of 30%.

“Outdated technologies of the last century can no longer compete with the massive innovations and falling cost curves in renewable energy and storage,” Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in an email statement.

Ember’s report closely tracks other forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which described the clean energy transition as “unstoppable” in October. International Energy Agency Expect the peak in global demand for coal, gas and oil this decade (for all energy uses, not just electricity). It also expected that renewable energy sources would constitute nearly 50 percent of the world’s electricity mix by 2030.