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E360 Digest
January 5, 2026
A solar and wind farm in Phan Rang-Tháp Chàm, Vietnam. Pexels
Even as the Trump administration rolled back support for renewable energy in the U.S., wind, solar, and electric vehicles made huge strides globally in 2025. For the first time, wind and solar supplied more power than coal worldwide, while plug-in vehicles accounted for more than a quarter of new car sales.
These milestones reflect the dramatic drop in the price of clean energy over the last decade and a half. Today, wind and solar are cheaper than coal and natural gas, and increasingly, they are boosted by ever more affordable batteries, which have gotten 90 percent cheaper over the last decade.
“Solar is no longer just cheap daytime electricity,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, analyst at energy think tank Ember. “Solar is now anytime dispatchable electricity.”
Newly added wind and solar met all new demand for power last year. The global surge in clean energy meant that, in the first half of last year, renewables generated more power than coal for the first time.
In China, the world’s biggest emitter, the rapid buildout of wind and solar is, for the first time, leading to a decline in coal power. For the past year and a half, China’s emissions have been flat or falling.
The cost of building, maintaining, and fueling a new power plant, without subsidies, adjusted for inflation. Prices based on combined cycle natural gas, utility-scale solar, and onshore wind. Source: Lazard. Yale Environment 360
Plug-in cars, meanwhile, hit a key milestone in 2025, accounting for more than a quarter of new car sales in the first 10 months of the year. In China alone, electric vehicles made up more than half of all new cars sold. As EVs take off and sales of conventional cars diminish, it is becoming increasingly clear that sales of gas-powered cars likely peaked in 2017.
The world is reaching such milestones despite a lurch toward fossil fuels in the U.S., where the Trump administration has slashed federal support for clean energy. While investment in clean energy has reached new highs worldwide, the U.S. is seeing a decline. The International Energy Agency projects that, between now and the end of this decade, U.S. renewables will grow roughly half as fast as was predicted in 2024. 
Still, global progress on moving away from fossil fuels was sufficient for the journal Science to name the rapid growth of clean energy its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year. 
While emissions continue to climb worldwide, the climate outlook has measurably improved over the last decade. A recent report found the world is now headed for around 2.8 degrees C of warming by the end of this century, far less than the 3.7 to 4.8 degrees C of warming that was forecast before the 2015 Paris Agreement.
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