In 2025 solar and wind together accounted for 99.7% of the net increase in the world's electricity generation. Solar alone generated 2,778.6 TWh, more than wind for the first time in this 1985–2025 series, while fossil generation was roughly flat.
Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026, published in April, first reported the 2025 data behind this post, including solar overtaking wind. This post reproduces the picture from open data, focusing on two things: how much of the year's growth came from solar and wind combined, and the plateau in fossil generation.
World electricity generation, all sources, 2024 to 2025. Data: global-electricity-mix, compiled by Our World in Data from Ember's Yearly Electricity Data and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy.
What this is measuring
World electricity generation, all sources, one row per year, 1985–2025. Generation, not capacity: this counts electricity actually produced, not panels and turbines installed. Every figure below is a share or a change in that one world total — not any single country or grid.
What the data says
World generation grew by 842.1 TWh in 2025. Solar's 636.0 TWh accounted for 75.5% of that net increase, and wind's 203.6 TWh for another 24.2%. Everything else combined added a net 2.5 TWh.
Fossil generation was roughly flat: about 18,234 TWh in 2025 against 18,275 TWh in 2024, a fall of about 0.2%, computed from fossil fuels' share of the total. These estimates may be revised.
Solar's 2025 generation was up 636.0 TWh on 2024's 2,142.7 TWh — bigger than any single year's increase in wind generation; wind's biggest was +265.5 TWh, in 2021. Solar's share of world generation reached 8.7%, up from 1.1% ten years earlier.
That took solar past wind for the first time in this 1985–2025 series: 2,778.6 TWh against wind's 2,713.1 TWh, a narrow 2.4% lead, in the November 2026 OWID snapshot that include estimates and may be revised. In 2024 wind was still ahead, 2,509.5 TWh to 2,142.7.
What hasn't changed
Fast growth from a small base is not dominance. Fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) still generated 57.4% of the world's electricity in 2025 — down from a peak of 68.3% in 2007, but still well over half.
Why, according to others
This dataset shows what happened, not why. Ember reports that China accounted for more than half of the global increase in both solar capacity and solar generation in 2025 (Global Electricity Review 2026).
How this was made
Figures come from global-electricity-mix in the DataPressr repository, built by build.ts from an archived 2 November 2026 snapshot of Our World in Data's energy dataset, filtered to the World rows. For this World series, OWID uses Ember from 2000 onward and Energy Institute data for earlier years (Our World in Data). Fossil generation in TWh is computed from fossil fuels' share of total generation. 2025 is the series' most recent year and may still be revised.
The CSV used here, the calculation and the chart builders (desktop, mobile) reproduce every number and chart. See PROVENANCE for attribution and source-specific reuse terms. From the download folder, run:
python3 solar-overtakes-wind-src/calculate.py
npm ci --ignore-scripts
node solar-overtakes-wind-make-charts.mjs
node make-mobile-charts.mjs