The shift away from coal and towards renewable sources of energy is slowly beginning to gain traction, two recently-released reports from American and global energy agencies show.
“The biggest story is in the case of renewables,” International Energy Agency executive director, Fatih Birol, told the Guardian as this year’s World Energy Outlook was released. “It is no longer a niche. Renewable energy has become a mainstream fuel, as of now.”
Almost half of the new power generation added in 2014 came from wind, solar, wave or tidal energy, the report found, and renewables now represent the world’s second largest source of electricity after coal. Coal, whose share of the world’s energy mix has been rising since 2000, has peaked, the agency indicated, predicting that within two decades, renewable energy sources will replace coal as the backbone of the world’s electricity source.