Coal has been beaten. Now comes the hard part.

The inflection point that actually happened

Somewhere between the policy retreats, the geopolitical shocks and the relentless argument about whether the energy transition was happening fast enough, it actually happened. The 2026 Global Electricity Review from Ember confirmed what many had been tracking but few had fully absorbed: for the first time in recorded energy history, renewable energy sources generated more electricity globally than coal. Renewables reached 33.8% of global electricity generation in 2025 — coal fell below a third for the first time ever at 33.0%, dropping by 63 terawatt-hours in a single year.

This is not a rounding error or a statistical artefact. It is a structural shift. Coal's fall is being driven not by policy mandate alone but by the irreversible economics of solar and wind, which have now become so cheap to build and operate in most of the world that they are displacing fossil fuel generation even in countries that never committed to doing so. The global fall in fossil generation was driven by a historic reversal in both China and India simultaneously — the first time in this century that fossil fuel generation fell in both countries in the same year.

And yet — 1.5°C is gone. A decade after the Paris Agreement articulated the stretch goal, global leaders have increasingly acknowledged that holding warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is no longer plausible. The transition is accelerating. It is not accelerating fast enough. Both of these things are true simultaneously, and understanding H1 2026 requires holding both in mind at once.

China — building twice as much as everyone else combined

The story of global decarbonisation in 2026 remains, overwhelmingly, a Chinese story. The numbers are so large they have become difficult to process. This year, China is on track to install a new record of 230 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity — backed by $140 billion in investment, with state subsidies for renewables abolished and yet the build-out accelerating regardless. That is more than the entire installed renewable capacity of Germany and the United Kingdom combined, in a single year.

The velocity matters as much as the scale. China's average annual new installed renewable capacity is expected to reach 200–300 gigawatts per year during its 15th Five-Year Plan period from 2026 to 2030. The country dominates global solar panel manufacturing, accounting for over 80% of production across all key stages. Chinese firms hold the top four positions among the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers. This is not just a domestic story — it is reshaping the economics of the global energy transition by making clean energy technology cheaper for everyone else.

The complication is that China remains the world's largest emitter, and its new five-year plan — approved at the National People's Congress in March 2026 — set a carbon intensity reduction target that many analysts consider conservative. The capacity additions are genuinely extraordinary. Whether they are arriving fast enough to peak emissions at the 2030 deadline China set for itself is a different and harder question.

Britain — 98.8% zero carbon and closing in on 100%

For a country that was generating 40% of its electricity from coal as recently as 2013, what Britain has done to its electricity grid in the space of a decade is extraordinary. In April 2026, the National Energy System Operator recorded the most significant milestone yet: Britain's electricity system ran at 98.8% zero-carbon for a half-hour period on April 22, with gas falling to its lowest ever share of the energy mix.

This was not a statistical fluke engineered by favourable conditions. It followed a new wind generation record set in the first three months of 2026, record solar output breaking records twice in April, and a new monthly record for combined wind and solar in March that generated 11 terawatt-hours of electricity — up 28% year-on-year and enough to avoid importing 21 TWh of gas that would have cost around £1 billion at current high prices, elevated by the US-Israel conflict with Iran.

The Labour government's target of decarbonising power supplies by 2030 — ambitious to the point of being controversial when it was announced in 2024 — is now looking less like a stretch goal and more like a plausible destination. The AR7 Contracts for Difference auction, whose results were announced in two tranches in early 2026, secured a record 8.4 gigawatts of offshore wind, including Britain's first floating offshore wind contracts at commercial scale. The record surpassed the previous European record for a single offshore wind tender.

Great British Energy, the publicly owned clean energy company established by the Labour government, has moved from concept to operational phase and is beginning to co-invest in projects. The Dogger Bank wind farm — the world's largest, situated off the Yorkshire coast — continued its phased commissioning through H1 2026 and will eventually supply around 6 million homes.

India — five years ahead of schedule

In the opening months of 2026, India announced a milestone that was not widely expected for years: the country's installed electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources crossed 50% — five years ahead of its commitment under the Paris Agreement. The milestone was reached through a combination of large-scale solar additions, growing wind deployment and continued investment in hydro and nuclear, and came as India's renewable power output rose at its fastest pace since 2022.

India now ranks fourth in the world for cumulative renewable energy capacity installations, behind China, the US and Germany. The country added 22 gigawatts of renewable capacity in just the first half of 2025 — 56% more than a year earlier — and the momentum has continued into 2026. Coal's share of installed capacity fell below 47% in 2024. The trajectory is clear even if the destination is contested: India plans to expand coal-fired capacity by 80 GW by 2032 to meet rising electricity demand, even as renewables surge past.

Germany — the coal exit advancing, the heating sector retreating

Germany has now retired a cumulative 33,570 megawatts of coal capacity — more than any other country has decommissioned in total. By early 2026, the hard coal decommissioning programme mandated by the 2020 Coal Phase-Out Act completed its final auctions, with 10 gigawatts of hard coal capacity decommissioned ahead of the 2026 deadline. The share of renewable power in Germany's electricity system is growing at a solid pace, with wind and solar now pillars of the energy system that underpin the wider economy.

The complication is Chancellor Friedrich Merz's government. The incoming conservative coalition has scrapped key elements of the previous government's building energy transition policy — specifically, the mandate requiring new heating installations to use a minimum share of renewable energy. This was a significant blow to Germany's heat pump industry, which had already suffered a sharp fall in sales in 2024 following the policy uncertainty the previous government created. Germany's heating sector decarbonisation — already the most politically contentious part of its energy transition — is now without a credible path.

Elsewhere in Europe, the picture is mixed. Spain continues to demonstrate that a high-renewable electricity system is not only technically viable but economically superior: wholesale electricity prices in the country were 32% below the EU average in 2025, largely because solar and wind have displaced more expensive gas generation, reducing Spain's exposure to fossil fuel price spikes. Greece accelerated its coal exit from 2028 to 2026. France is pressing ahead with its nuclear renaissance, approving six new reactors. The EU's Emissions Trading System for buildings and transport — ETS2 — is now in preparation for its 2027 launch, extending carbon pricing into two of the most politically sensitive and technically difficult sectors to decarbonise.

The USA — where politics and physics are pulling in opposite directions

The United States is the most complicated and consequential story of H1 2026 because it contains two entirely contradictory realities operating simultaneously. In the market, clean energy deployment continues at extraordinary pace. In Washington, the Trump administration has undertaken what amounts to the most comprehensive assault on clean energy policy in American history.

The market reality first. The US installed a record 50 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2024. Solar and wind produced 17% of the country's electricity last year. Battery storage deployment is scaling rapidly. Iowa now gets 60% of its electricity from renewable sources. In Texas, renewable energy supplied 40% of electricity generation in early 2024. These are not policy artefacts — they are the result of underlying economics that tariffs and permit revocations cannot easily reverse.

The honest answer, based on the H1 2026 evidence, is that it can delay but not reverse. The economics of solar and storage have moved beyond the point where policy can simply switch them off. But the US contribution to the global transition is being meaningfully reduced at exactly the moment when it matters most.

The global scorecard — what is working and what is not

The hard sectors — where the transition is moving too slowly

The power sector story of H1 2026 is largely positive. The harder story is everything else. Electricity generation is the sector that the energy transition has most successfully penetrated. Transport is following, with electric vehicles crossing 20% of new global car sales in major markets. But industry, buildings, aviation and shipping remain stubbornly difficult — and the policy frameworks to address them are either absent, fragile or actively being dismantled.

Buildings and heat

The heat transition is the most politically toxic front of the energy transition in almost every country that has tried to address it. Germany scrapped its fossil boiler replacement mandate. The UK's heat pump adoption remains far below the trajectory needed to meet its own targets. France has incentive schemes but insufficient installer capacity. The fundamental problem is that decarbonising home heating requires individual households to spend significant capital — £10,000–15,000 in the UK — on equipment that is unfamiliar and that many installers still install poorly. The technology works. The deployment machine does not yet.

Aviation

Air travel has rebounded strongly after the COVID-19 dip, and continued growth is projected. Sustainable aviation fuel now exists at commercial scale but represents a tiny fraction of actual fuel consumed. The cost premium remains large enough that voluntary schemes are insufficient to drive the transition without regulatory mandates, and the regulatory environment in most major markets remains permissive of conventional jet fuel. Aviation is the transport sector most at risk of becoming the last large emitter standing.

AI and the electricity demand paradox

The most significant new dynamic in H1 2026 that was not present in earlier transition discussions is the electricity demand impact of artificial intelligence. Data centres are consuming electricity at rates that were not anticipated in any major grid planning exercise conducted five years ago. This is creating an unexpected ally for clean energy: the technology sector's insatiable demand for electricity — and its equally powerful need to claim clean power credentials — is driving corporate power purchase agreements at unprecedented scale. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon have all announced new clean power procurement commitments in H1 2026. The irony that AI — the most energy-intensive consumer technology ever commercialised — may become one of the biggest drivers of renewable energy investment is one of the stranger stories of the transition.