Wind and solar, the fastest-growing sources of electricity, reached a record 10% of global electricity in 2021, according to a report by the energy think tank Ember.
“The milestone has now been reached by 50 countries around the world. Overall, clean sources generated 38% of the world’s electricity in 2021, more than coal (36%),” said a media statement on Wednesday.
Of the electricity generated solely through solar and wind, 98% was produced from solar energy in 2021, as per dataset on Bangladesh on Global Electricity Review 2022 by Ember.
According to the statement, wind and solar contributed to 0.59 terawatt per hour (TWh) of the total electricity generation in Bangladesh in 2021, which represents 0.72% of the total electricity generation from both sources.
“Wind and solar have arrived,” said Dave Jones, the global lead for Ember.
“The process that will reshape the existing energy system has begun. This decade, they need to be deployed at lightning speed to reverse global emissions increases and tackle climate change,” he added.
“Clean electricity now needs to be built on a heroic scale,” he said, adding: “Leaders are only just waking up to the challenge of how quickly they need to move 100% clean electricity.”
Ember released its third annual Global Electricity Review alongside all the underlying data.
The dataset and report cover electricity generation for 209 countries from 2000 to 2020, with the latest data for 2021 for 75 countries representing 93% of global power demand.
According to the report, 50 countries generated more than a tenth of their electricity from wind and solar in 2021, including all five of the world’s largest economies.
Seven new countries passed the landmark for the first time in 2021: China, Japan, Mongolia, Viet Nam, Argentina, Hungary, and El Salvador, the statement read.
Across the world, the share of wind and solar has doubled since 2015 when the Paris Agreement was signed, it added.
Moreover, electricity demand rebounded after the pandemic to the largest ever annual increase in 2021 (+1,414 TWh).
Despite record growth in wind and solar generation, they only met 29% of the global increase in electricity demand in 2021, with the rest met by fossil fuels.
The report highlighted that Bangladesh emitted around 45.44 MtCO2 in 2021 with an emission intensity of 559.606 gCO2 per kWh, representing around 0.28 tCO2 per capita emission in this year.
It is almost double that in 2010, when the per capita emission was 0.15 tCO2per, emitting 22.11 MtCO2 with an emission intensity of 574.435.
Moreover, the emission rate in 2021 was four times higher than 20 years ago in 2000, when the emission per capita was only 0.07 tCO2 with an emission rate of 8.52 MtCO2.
In 2021, coal power saw the fastest growth since at least 1985 (+9%), rising to a new all-time high of 10,042 TWh, remaining unmatched by global gas generation, which increased by only 1% in 2021.
The increase in fossil fuels pushed global power sector CO2 emissions to an all-time high, beating the previous record in 2018 by 3%.
The report recommends that high wind and solar growth rates need to be sustained.
