00:00Solar and wind have overtaken coal as a global electricity source for the first time.
00:06That's according to a new report by the think tank Ember.
00:09It found that in the first half of the year, renewable energy sources have produced more electricity than coal.
00:16The report says that growth in wind and solar was so strong that it outpaced rising global demand for electricity.
00:23And China is the world's largest producer of renewable energy.
00:26But India is increasing its renewable capacity.
00:28The International Energy Agency predicts that it will be the second largest producer by 2030.
00:35Meanwhile, the United States, which is currently the world's second largest producer of renewable energy, is slowing down its production.
00:42The IEA has halved its forecast for renewable energy growth in North America because of President Trump's policies.
00:49Let's talk now to Malkazata Vyatros-Motica, who's lead author of that report by the think tank Ember.
00:55Welcome to the programme.
00:56So how much of a milestone is this?
00:59We've seen renewables just surpassing coal when it comes to electric power generation.
01:06Hello.
01:07Thank you for having me on your programme.
01:10And this is a crucial point at the moment, as it is for the first time ever that renewable energy overtook coal.
01:20So the era of the growth of fossil fuel is coming to the end.
01:28Do you think it can last though?
01:29You say it's coming to the end, but is it?
01:30I mean, is it a forward movement or could it just be a blitz?
01:35No, you cannot stop it now.
01:39This is because economies that largely depend on coal, like China and India,
01:46they are the economies where their future growth will come mostly on the global scale.
01:52And we see already in China that they are adding a huge amount of clean sources.
01:58The generation from electricity, generation from coal is beginning to plateau.
02:07So you cannot stop this now.
02:09We are going to see more and more clean sources.
02:13So we know that China has been a leader in renewables.
02:16We are now seeing India hot on its heels on track to become the second largest producer of renewables.
02:22And having these big economies on board with the green transition really is good news when it comes to the climate, isn't it?
02:31It is.
02:31So now you have the emerging markets leading the way instead of advanced economies, which is amazing and also shows that advanced economies should speed up whatever they do to have more renewable power.
02:53So they are not overtaken totally by new economies.
02:59You know, everyone should care.
03:00And something else that's growing, power uses in general, some of it down to AI, which, of course, needs a lot of power to function.
03:08How can renewables scale up to replace coal in generating power for artificial intelligence?
03:16So we know that AI is one of the growing demand sources.
03:23What happened for the half of the year and this year was that solar and wind overtook this growing demand from from for electricity.
03:35So the cleaner electricity is the cleaner sectors that used this electricity are and obviously you can deploy solar panels almost everywhere.
03:50I want to ask you before you go about a separate report from the IEA about the revision down of the U.S. use of renewables.
04:01How big an influence is U.S. policy on this?
04:09We didn't look at this because we we reviewed data for the half of the year, first half of the year.
04:18However, however, we noted that coal grew in in the U.S.A.
04:25It has been replacing gas that was mainly due to gas price at the beginning of the year when it was high.
04:33So solar has been still rising strong there.
04:40So we will see maybe impact further down the line.
04:43But for the first half of the year, yes, we saw fossil rising.
04:50But we cannot contribute this to policy because we didn't look at that.
04:57Malgozata, good to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us on the program.
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