The Energy Transitions Commission’s annual monitor finds clean electrification racing ahead in power and road transport, while coal, methane, forests and heat go unaddressed. Lord Adair Turner calls parts of the decade “a disaster”.
Global clean energy investment reached a record $2.1 trillion in 2025. Renewables supplied 99 per cent of the growth in global electricity generation over the same period, while coal-fired and oil-fired output both contracted. Solar, batteries and electric vehicles again beat every forecast made of them.
And yet global greenhouse gas emissions are flat. They have stopped climbing steeply, though they have not begun to fall. The Energy Transition Monitor 2026, published on 2 September by the Energy Transitions Commission, calls this the paradox of progress.
Lord Adair Turner, Co-Chair of the ETC, used the same word on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that morning. “It’s a sort of paradox,” he said. “It’s a mix of very, very good, much better than we expected, and bad.”
A transition running at two speeds
Pace is the central finding. Around 60 per cent of global emissions can be cut through clean electrification at little or no extra cost. Those emissions come mainly from power generation and road transport, where the economics now favour the clean option outright.
Turner compared today’s position with what the sector expected a decade ago. Progress on solar, batteries and EVs has run “far faster than we expected ten years ago, and some of these trends are now unstoppable”, he told the programme. Solar paired with batteries is becoming a cheaper source of round-the-clock power than coal generation in many parts of the world, he argued. Road transport will electrify eventually, and the shift is accelerating.
Electric vehicle sales show as much. In China, 56 per cent of new passenger vehicles sold in 2025 were electric. Across the EU and UK, around one in five new cars bought is now an EV.
Progress in the remaining 40 per cent of emissions looks very different. High-temperature industrial heat, aviation, shipping and parts of agriculture all need solutions that either carry a green cost premium or remain early in commercial development. These sectors have no equivalent of the cheap solar panel.
The sectors where the decade has gone backwards
Turner was very clear about the failures. “There are other sectors of the economy which we are not managing to reduce the emissions of,” he said. “For instance, in the UK it’s in residential and commercial heat.” Some areas have gone further backwards still. “There are some areas where the 2020s have been a disaster,” he said, citing deforestation among them. “We have not put a stop to deforestation.”
The monitor identifies four actions that remain largely unaddressed. They are coal use, methane emissions, deforestation and the scale-up of carbon removals. None depends on a technology that has yet to be invented – the solutions exist already.
“Coal is not phasing down, methane emissions are not falling, forests are still being cut down, and carbon removal is nowhere near the scale required. We must act to address these. Only by doing this can we stop the rapid heating of the planet, and we are seeing the effects of this in real time,” said Jules Kortenhorst, Co-Chair of the Energy Transitions Commission.
Methane carries particular weight in that list. The gas is responsible for roughly 0.5°C of warming to date, though it clears the atmosphere far faster than carbon dioxide. Cutting leaks from oil and gas operations, landfill and food waste therefore delivers temperature benefits within years rather than decades.
Heading for 2.5°C
Turner gave the numbers directly. “Whereas the world said it was going to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade, at the moment the best estimate is that we’re heading for 2.5 degrees centigrade warming by the end of this century,” he said. The monitor carries the same figure and confirms that 1.5°C has already been breached.
Record renewables growth has still only covered 40 per cent of the rise in global energy demand. Fossil fuels supplied the rest. Demand from data centres, cooling and heavy industry has kept climbing, and electricity remains only about a fifth of total final energy use.
Global renewable capacity has almost doubled since 2022 and looks set to double again by 2030. Even so, that trajectory lands roughly 900 GW short of the tripling pledged at COP28.
Grids have become the binding constraint
Much of the shortfall waits in queues rather than in unbuilt projects. Around 375 GW of renewables and 455 GW of battery storage are stuck in European connection and permitting processes. In the United States, roughly 2,300 GW awaits grid connection. In China, nearly 10 per cent of wind and solar output was curtailed in the first half of 2026 because the grid could not absorb it.
“Clean energy is now outpacing fossil growth, but deployment speed alone won’t cut emissions. Without removing grid bottlenecks, securing buyer commitments for clean industrial products, and achieving cost breakthroughs in shipping and aviation, emissions will continue to plateau and not fall,” Turner said in the report’s accompanying statement.
The industrial gap comes down to buyers
Around 1,000 clean industrial projects have been announced globally. Fewer than 20 per cent have reached a final investment decision. Carbon pricing has strengthened, which improves the economics, though firm purchase commitments from buyers are still scarce.
China dominates what has been built. It supplies 83 per cent of the world’s renewable energy equipment and 45 per cent of clean industrial plant equipment. Of 19 global clean heavy-industry investment decisions taken in the first half of 2026, 13 were made in China.
Regional pictures diverge sharply
In the United States, federal policy has slowed the transition without halting it. Some 21 GW of clean energy has been cancelled since January 2025 and fossil capacity additions surged 71 per cent across 2025 and 2026. Renewable growth, however, slowed by only 2 per cent. Data centres pull in both directions at once, accounting for half of all new clean energy contracts while driving the largest increase in new fossil power capacity.
The EU and UK have cut emissions faster than any other major economies, though momentum has recently eased. India has the world’s cheapest renewables and installs them nine times more slowly than China, with 6.4 per cent annual electricity demand growth absorbing new clean capacity rather than displacing coal.
What governments would have to do
Asked what could still be done, Turner answered with policy rather than technology. “What we need to do is reinforce policies across the world, and that means somewhat different things in different countries,” he said. He gave China as an example, where the ETC works closely with the country’s iron and steel industry, and argued that even the strongest performers now need to move beyond what they have already achieved.
A UN Environment Programme assessment published the same morning reinforces the ETC’s perspective on global temperature increase. Its best case runs to 1.8°C, achieved through an overshoot that peaks and then declines, with other scenarios exceeding 2°C. Reaching that best case would require renewables to supply 60 to 70 per cent of global electricity by 2030, up from almost 34 per cent in 2025.
That target depends on the laggard sectors catching up. Power and road transport are largely taking care of themselves. Coal retirement, methane leaks, heat decarbonisation and forest protection will decide which outcome the world eventually experiences.
