This year has seen waves of bad news for the global fight to halt catastrophic climate change. Fossil fuel production is still increasing, driving up planet-warming pollution; the United States is in climate denial mode; and turbulent geopolitics have pushed the climate crisis down the agenda and into the culture wars.

But there’s another, more hopeful, story unfolding simultaneously: the exponential rise of clean energy. Countries around the world are adding renewables at a blistering pace — and this surge is happening in some surprising places. Experts say it could herald the start of a new energy age, powered by the sun and wind.

In the first half of 2025, for the first time ever, renewables overtook coal as the top source of global electricity — a major milestone, according to analysts. How the world gets its electricity is hugely important; the energy sector is the largest source of global emissions, and clean electricity is also key to decarbonizing transportation, another heavily polluting industry.

This clean energy surge is set to increase exponentially as wind, solar and batteries become cheaper and easier to install than fossil fuels.

Global renewable power capacity is projected to double over the next five years, increasing by 4,600 gigawatts (GW) — roughly the same as adding the total power generating capacity of China, the European Union and Japan, according to a recent International Energy Agency report.

“There is no going back,” Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at climate think tank Ember, told CNN.

Yet despite the pace, some experts say much more is needed. Renewables aren’t supplanting planet-heating fossil fuels in many countries because energy demand is growing so rapidly. That means planet heating pollution levels are still rising and every bit of warming translates to more catastrophic climate outcomes.

Transforming the entire power sector to clean energy isn’t yet inevitable, said Hannah Pitt, a director at the nonpartisan think tank Rhodium Group, where she oversees international energy research. “We don’t have it in the bag,” she told CNN.

After spending decades pumping planet-heating carbon into the atmosphere to grow their economies, the world’s most-polluting countries are increasingly turning to clean energy. One of the big reasons is economics: renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper. Low-cost solar, in particular, is driving the clean energy boom.

China has been described as the “first electrostate.” No other country comes close on renewables; last year, it installed more wind and solar power in just one year than the total amount of renewable energy currently operating in the United States.

By the end of last year, China had installed more than 1,400 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity and it’s not stopping there; another 500 gigawatts of clean energy is currently being built.

The US, in contrast, is pulling back on renewables as President Donald Trump seeks to strangle clean energy projects, but even that hasn’t stopped the renewable energy march. Wind and solar installations account for the vast majority of new power coming online. The US ranks second globally in new solar growth after China, according to Ember data.

The current clean energy boom in the US is, in part, driven by businesses rushing to take advantage of Biden-era clean energy tax credits before they expire. But even without federal tax credits, solar, batteries and onshore wind are some of the cheapest and fastest forms of energy to install.

India, the planet’s most populous nation, is also setting new records on renewables; it is one of the leading developing countries for new solar and wind capacity, according to a report from BloombergNEF. And the EU, which has plenty of policies favoring clean energy, aims to generate nearly 43% of its energy from renewables by the end of the decade.

That’s not to say the planet’s biggest emitters have given up on fossil fuels.

In China — the world biggest climate polluter by far — new coal production reached a ten year high last year, according to one analysis. Having released a tepid climate goal for the next decade, it remains to be seen how much its emissions fall, especially as demand for power accelerates.

The US is relying more on coal-fired power, leading to an increase in its planet-heating pollution, according to Ember’s recent report, and India is turning to fossil fuels to help power its exponential growth. The EU saw a slight uptick in fossil fuel generation this year to compensate for both falling wind power generation and declining hydropower due to lingering drought.

The world’s biggest polluters matter because of their sheer size and climate footprint. But equally important, experts say, is the pollution trajectory of smaller economies — many in the global south — which are hungry for energy and growing rapidly.

There is a shift toward renewables in countries across South America, Africa, southeast Asia and the Middle East, in many cases helped by the flood of cheap solar panels, batteries and wind turbine components from China, which dominates the world in clean tech manufacturing.

“We’ve seen the world starting to benefit from that scale, enabling these emerging economies to seize the opportunity to really leap-frog into the next energy era,” said Lars Nitter Havro, who leads energy macro research at Norwegian-headquartered firm Rystad Energy.

Nepal, for example, has gone from barely having any electric vehicles just a few years ago, to EVs making up nearly 76% of all new vehicles thanks to imports of battery-powered cars from China. The Himalayan country relies heavily on clean energy, using its abundant hydropower resources to power its grid.

Some countries are pulling off stunningly fast energy transitions, adding solar so rapidly, it’s become a major source of electricity over the course of years — not decades.

Pakistan, Chile, Greece and Hungary are among those charging ahead.

A decade ago, Hungary had next to no solar power but it’s seen a rapid boom. Led by a far-right authoritarian government, the country has nevertheless encouraged rooftop and utility-scale solar through a mix of government rebates and relaxed regulations.

Chile has been installing vast amounts of solar in its remote Atacama Desert, while Greece has also seen a major boom as solar panels are installed on its Mediterranean hills and islands.

Perhaps the most startling surge is in Pakistan, which is experiencing one of the fastest solar revolutions in the world. In just six years, the share of solar in its power mix went from zero to 30%. Pakistan’s surge is “preposterous,” said Havro. “This is the tipping point. Things are starting to unfold faster than many foresaw in the past.”

However, building renewables alone isn’t the whole picture. Countries also need to work on better connecting intermittent renewables — those which work only when the sun shines or the wind blows — with batteries that can store their energy.

Some analysts caution that the coal, oil and gas aren’t going away in many places. “A lot of fossil power technologies continue to play a really meaningful role (in developing countries), even growing in our projection going through 2050,” Rhodium’s Pitt said. “Renewables have an even bigger job to do in keeping pace with that economic growth in order to really keep driving down emissions,” she added.

Rystad has a more optimistic view, because renewables are often the cheapest option. “In countries where there isn’t any entrenched pre-existing (fossil fuel) infrastructure that’s hard to replace, we do see more of a leapfrog dynamic unfolding,” Rystad’s Havro said.

Developing countries could be poised to race past the world’s biggest economies on renewables, demonstrating a new era of clean energy, said Ember’s Wiatros-Motyka. “You cannot stop it now.”