When the Lights Came On: Global Electricity and the Electronic Era in 2026

There's a specific smell I still associate with studying: hot candle wax and the faint kerosene of a tuki lamp. Growing up in Kathmandu, that smell meant the power was out again — and in the dry winter months, it was out for up to eighteen hours a day. You learned to do your homework in a shrinking circle of yellow light, to charge the family's one inverter the instant electricity flickered back, and to treat a fully charged laptop like a small inheritance.

So forgive me if I still find it slightly unbelievable that Nepal now sells electricity to India for billions of rupees a year. The country that taught me scarcity has become, in its small way, an exporter of abundance. That personal reversal is really the whole story of this post in miniature — because 2025 was the year the entire planet's electricity story quietly turned a corner. I spent weeks reading through the IEA, Ember, BloombergNEF, Eurostat and Nepal's own Nepal Electricity Authority filings to understand it. Here's what I found, region by region, and what it means for every device you own.

First, the scale — because it's genuinely hard to picture

Global electricity demand reached roughly 28,200 TWh in 2025 and is set to cross 29,000 TWh in 2026, according to the IEA — rising more than twice as fast as total energy demand. To put a single TWh in perspective: it's roughly what a small country burns in a year. We're adding hundreds of them annually now.

And then the headline, the one I had to re-read to believe. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026, for the first time in roughly 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix. The last time anything other than coal led was around 1919, when hydropower briefly edged ahead. Coal fell below a third of world generation for the first time in the modern grid era. Low-carbon sources together — renewables plus nuclear — reached about 42-43% of global generation in 2025 (42% per the IEA, 43% by Ember's tally), a share that has climbed every year this decade.

The technology mix, and the milestones that stacked up in one year

The engine of the crossover was solar. Solar generation grew by a record 636 TWh in 2025 — the single largest one-year increase from any energy source on record, per Ember. Together, solar and wind met the overwhelming majority of the year's demand growth, which is why global fossil generation actually fell by about 0.2% — a rare structural decline outside a recession or pandemic.

Three other milestones matter just as much:

• Batteries turned daytime solar into anytime solar. BloombergNEF recorded 112 GW / 307 GWh of storage added in 2025, up 48% year-on-year and roughly ten times the 2021 figure. China installed more than half of it; the US about 16%.
• Batteries got absurdly cheap. Lithium-ion pack prices fell to a record $108/kWh in 2025 (BNEF), down roughly 93% from around $1,400-1,500/kWh in 2010. Stationary-storage packs hit just $70/kWh — now the cheapest segment of all.
• Nuclear quietly hit an all-time high of 2,812 TWh in 2025 (Ember), and the tech giants rediscovered it. Microsoft's 20-year deal to restart Three Mile Island (now the Crane Clean Energy Center, ~835 MW) is targeting a restart in the second half of 2027, and Google has contracted 500 MW of Kairos Power small modular reactors for a fleet running through 2035. The pipeline of conditional offtake agreements between data-center operators and SMR projects has grown from 25 GW at the end of 2024 to about 45 GW today — though most of it delivers in the 2030s.

The region-by-region world tour

North America — demand roars back

Per the U.S. EIA, American electricity demand grew about 1.7% annually between 2020 and 2025 (versus just 0.1% a year from 2005-2019), and the EIA's January 2026 forecast calls for the strongest multi-year growth since the early 2000s, driven by data centers. Texas overtook California as the largest US solar market and set battery records. The real bottleneck everywhere is the interconnection queue: transformers and grid connections, not panels.

Latin America — the storage front-runners

Brazil runs on roughly 75% clean electricity, mostly hydro. The quiet stars are the solar-plus-storage pioneers: Chile and Brazil have installed enough grid batteries to shift a meaningful share of new solar generation into the evening in 2025, cutting curtailment and prices.

Europe — a clean grid and a sobering warning

The EU drew 47.3% of its electricity from renewables in 2025 (Eurostat), with Denmark at 92.4%, Austria at 83.1%, and Portugal at 82.9%. But Europe also delivered the cautionary tale of the decade. On 28 April 2025, at 12:33 CEST, the grids of Spain and Portugal collapsed in under 20 seconds, cutting power to more than 50 million people for up to 16 hours in parts of Spain. ENTSO-E's Expert Panel final report (published 20 March 2026) was blunt: this was not caused by renewables per se, but by gaps in voltage and reactive-power control, fixed-power-factor inverter settings, and cascading generator disconnections. Spain had only about 28 MW of battery storage at the time. The lesson for every high-renewables grid — including Nepal's future one — is that you need reactive-power support, grid-forming inverters, and real interconnection before the concrete is poured.

Middle East — sunshine plus gas

The Gulf pairs some of the world's cheapest electricity with giant solar farms, while Saudi Arabia leans into oil-to-gas switching in its power sector. Vast land, cheap capital, brutal cooling loads.

Africa — the continent still waiting for the switch

Here the numbers stop me cold. Per the IEA's Financing Electricity Access in Africa (2025), roughly 600 million people in Africa still live without access to electricity — the vast majority of the global access gap. Progress has actually slowed in recent years even as the overall gap remains enormous. Mission 300 (World Bank + African Development Bank) aims to connect 300 million people by 2030. There is genuine hope: distributed solar and mini-grids are leapfrogging the grid entirely in several countries, and Africa saw strong growth in solar installations in 2025.

South Asia — India's coal-and-solar duality, and Nepal's turn

India crossed 500 GW of total installed capacity in September 2025, with non-fossil sources making up about 51% of that — hitting its 2030 clean-capacity milestone five years early. It added a record ~44.5 GW of renewables in 2025, pushed solar capacity past 132 GW, and coal generation actually fell about 3% — only the second full-year drop in half a century. And yet coal still generates nearly half of India's electricity. That contradiction — record solar and a large coal pipeline — is the defining tension of the world's most populous country.

Nepal — the country that taught me scarcity

This is the part that's personal.

When Kulman Ghising took over the Nepal Electricity Authority in September 2016, load-shedding had been a fact of Nepali life for a decade — up to 18 hours a day in the dry season. Within months he'd ended it in Kathmandu; by May 2018 he declared the entire country load-shedding-free, not through some miracle of new dams but through ruthless management: storing water for peak hours, ending sweetheart deals that gave a few industries 24-hour power at everyone else's expense, cutting leakage, and finishing stalled transmission lines. He became a folk hero. (In a very Nepali twist, he was removed from the NEA's top job in March 2025 amid political fights and has since entered politics — but that's another post.)

The hardware caught up with the management. Upper Tamakoshi (456 MW), Nepal's largest plant, came fully online in 2021, and the 900 MW Arun III, being built by India's SJVN, remains under construction. By the end of FY2024/25, Nepal's installed capacity reached about 3,591 MW (roughly 95% hydro).

Then came the reversal I still find astonishing. Nepal began exporting to India in November 2021. In FY2024/25, Nepal exported roughly 2.35 billion units of electricity worth about NPR 17.46 billion (NEA), becoming a net electricity exporter with a net trade profit of about NPR 4.57 billion. In November 2024, it also began seasonally exporting 40 MW to Bangladesh via a tripartite deal routed through India — the first time Nepal has ever exported power to a third country. Electricity access has climbed to somewhere between 94% (World Bank) and roughly 98% (NEA), and NEA — which lost money for years — has returned to sustained profitability. The country's long-term ambition is to keep building toward tens of thousands of megawatts of hydropower capacity over the next decade.

The kid doing homework by candlelight would not have believed a word of it.

East Asia — China is simply the electricity superpower

There is China, and there is everyone else. In 2025, China added 336 TWh of new solar generation — more than the entire rest of the world combined (about 300 TWh) — accounting for roughly 53% of all global solar additions (Ember). Installed solar hit 1.20 TW, up 35% in a single year. Coal's share of Chinese generation fell to about 54%, down from around 70% a decade ago. Stitching it together is the world's largest ultra-high-voltage grid: by the end of 2025, China had commissioned 45 UHV lines totalling about 52,300 km, moving desert solar and wind to the coastal megacities over enormous distances. Japan restarted reactors; Korea is wrestling with a serious grid-connection backlog.

Southeast Asia — the coal holdout

Vietnam had a spectacular solar boom, but the region as a whole still leans on coal, whose share sits close to half of generation and has actually risen over the decade — the mirror image of the global trend.

Oceania — the world's rooftop

Australia is the household-solar capital of the planet. Rooftop solar now sits on more than 4.3 million homes and businesses — roughly one in three — for 28.3 GW of capacity, which exceeds the country's entire coal fleet (22.5 GW), per the Clean Energy Council. Rooftop panels supplied 14.2% of national generation in the second half of 2025, up from 7.2% in 2020. And the batteries have arrived: a record 183,245 home battery units sold in H2 2025 alone — about four times the units sold in H2 2024.

The electronic era: how electricity shapes our devices, and our devices reshape electricity

Here's the feedback loop that fascinates me. Cheap, abundant electricity enables a tidal wave of new devices — and those devices then bend the grid to their will.

AI chips are the extreme case. Nvidia's power draw has climbed generation by generation: the A100 drew about 400W, the H100 around 700W, the B200 up to 1,000W, and the GB300 around 1,200W per GPU. A full NVIDIA GB200/GB300 NVL72 rack draws somewhere in the range of 120-140kW under full load — roughly 13 to 15 times the current industry-average rack of about 9kW (Uptime Institute, 2025) — which is why liquid cooling has gone from exotic to mandatory.

The chips that make the chips are just as hungry. Per S&P Global Ratings, TSMC's power consumption was 8.4% of Taiwan's entire domestic electricity use in 2023, and is projected to climb toward 23.7% by 2030 in its high-growth case — a single company potentially consuming close to a quarter of a nation's power.

EVs are becoming grid actors, not just cars. The global EV fleet consumed around 250 TWh in 2025 — about 1% of world electricity — while displacing roughly 1.7 million barrels of oil per day (IEA).

Batteries powered the portable era and are now stabilizing the grid. That 93% price collapse since 2010 is arguably one of the most important cost curves of our lifetime — it made phones, laptops, EVs, and grid storage all economically inevitable.

And here's the paradox. Every device gets more efficient per unit of work, and yet total demand keeps climbing — the Jevons paradox in the flesh: efficiency lowers cost, lower cost expands use, and net consumption rises. Data centers and EVs were among the fastest-growing loads in 2025, even though buildings and industry still drive the bulk of demand growth.

The impacts we can't look away from

Power-sector emissions have roughly plateaued even as demand grows — a real sign that clean growth can outrun demand growth in some markets. Electricity is still the single largest source of energy-related emissions, but the curve is bending.

Access is still brutally unequal. Nepal at roughly 94-98% access sits alongside a sub-Saharan Africa where hundreds of millions of people still have none. The transition is real, but it is not yet fair.

E-waste is the shadow of the device boom. The world generated a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022 (UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024), on track for 82 million tonnes by 2030 — and only about 22.3% is formally recycled.

Blackout risk is the new frontier. Iberia proved that a modern, clean, and sophisticated grid can still fall over in under 20 seconds if the invisible plumbing — voltage control, inertia, interconnection — isn't upgraded alongside the panels.

An honest close

I don't think the direction is in doubt anymore. Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world's rising appetite for electricity, batteries are making that clean power dispatchable, and even China and India — the fossil giants — saw their fossil generation fall or slow in 2025. The era of fossil growth in the power sector is ending, even in a world of surging demand.

But the destination and the speed are different questions. The grid, the storage, the minerals, the fairness, and the environmental accounting are all racing to catch up with the panels. From Kathmandu — where I once guarded a charged laptop like treasure, and where my country now sells its rivers' surplus to its giant neighbour — I find this moment both thrilling and deeply unequal. The lights came on for me. They haven't come on for hundreds of millions of others yet. That gap, more than any terawatt figure, is the number I'll be watching.

Sources

• International Energy Agency (IEA): Electricity 2026; Global Energy Review 2026; Global EV Outlook 2026; Financing Electricity Access in Africa (2025)
• Ember: Global Electricity Review 2026
• BloombergNEF: Energy Storage Market Outlook 1H 2026; 2025 Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey
• Eurostat; U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA); Clean Energy Council (Australia)
• ENTSO-E Expert Panel final report on the Iberian blackout (20 March 2026)
• Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA)
• UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (UNITAR/ITU); S&P Global Ratings; Uptime Institute