The future is determined by what happens today, followed by what happens tomorrow. What happened yesterday is no longer relevant.
When “King Coal or King Solar?” ran in The Conversation back in 2012, we argued that the real contest was in new capacity, not in the legacy fleet.
Fourteen years on, our updated chart shows how decisively that bet has paid off: In 2025 the world installed 814 GW of new solar and wind, compared with just 158 GW of gross fossil (coal + gas + oil) and only about 131 GW of net fossil once fossil retirements are counted.
In capacity-addition terms, fossils are now just a thin orange strip at the bottom of a very tall green wall.
As our very recent analysis on Renew Economy notes, solar is now creating the fastest shift in electricity generation in history – and it is still accelerating.
The 2025 build alone adds enough clean capacity to replace roughly one-seventh of global gas generation, and helped renewables overtake coal in global electricity production for the first time. These trends have not slowed in 2026.
Whatever happens to short-term fossil investment cycles, the King Renewables chart-of-the-day makes the structural verdict hard to miss: the era of King Coal – and indeed King Fossil – is over; the age of King Solar (and Wind – and Batteries) has arrived.
