The International Energy Agency (IEA) Electricity mid-year update report forecasts that global electricity demand will grow by 4% in 2024 and continue to rise in 2025. Solar is expected to meet roughly half of this growth in demand.

The report explores the latest data for 2023 and 2024, and uses it to forecast global electricity demand for 2025.

The report also explores supply by fuel type and CO2 emissions from the power sector, and analyses the latest developments in major markets, including China, the US, the European Union and India.

he findings reveal that global electricity demand will grow by around 4% in 2024, up from 2.5% in 2023 – the highest annual growth rate since 2007. This 4% growth is set to continue into 2025.

Global economic growth, intense heatwaves and increasing uptake of technologies including electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps are behind the rapid growth.

Keisuke Sadamori, IEA director of energy markets and security, said: “Growth in global electricity demand this year and next is set to be among the fastest in the past two decades, highlighting the growing role of electricity in our economies as well as the impacts of severe heatwaves.”

And as this demand grows, renewable sources of electricity are also set to expand rapidly, with their share of global electricity supply forecast to rise from 30% in 2023 to 35% in 2025.

For the first time, in 2024 renewable sources of electricity will outstrip coal generation which is expected to drop from a 36% share to 33% over the same period.

Solar PV alone is expected to meet roughly half of the growth in global electricity demand over 2024 and 2025. Solar and wind combined could meet as much as three-quarters of the growth.

Despite the sharp increases in renewables, global coal-fired generation is anticipated to increase slightly in 2024, growing by less than 1%, following a 1.9% increase in 2023. This growth is driven by demand in India and China in particular.

However, the report also predicts that if Chinese hydropower production recovers strongly from its 2023 low, it could curb coal-fired power generation and cause a slight decline in global power sector emissions in 2024.

Sadamori said: “It’s encouraging to see clean energy’s share of the electricity mix continuing to rise, but this needs to happen at a much faster rate to meet international energy and climate goals.

“At the same time, it’s crucial to expand and reinforce grids to provide citizens with secure and reliable electricity supply – and to implement higher energy efficiency standards to reduce the impacts of increased cooling demand on power systems.”

The IEA report also acknowledges that there is now a focus on electricity demand from data centres, with artificial intelligence (AI) technology continuing to grow. It estimates that the electricity consumption of data centres accounted for 1% to 1.3% of global electricity demand in 2022.

This share could get within the range of 1.5% to 3% by 2026, according to IEA predictions.

By contrast, EVs consumed 0.2% of the world’s electricity in 2022, with consumption forecast to range from less than 1.5% to 2% by 2026.

The report does acknowledge that data centre electricity consumption has historically seen a wide range of estimates – a lack of reliable data contributes to some uncertainty about the electricity demand of data centres, including the pace of deployment, the diverse and expanding uses of AI, and the potential for energy efficiency improvements.

The IEA says that better collection of electricity consumption data in this sector will be essential to identify past developments correctly and to better understand future trends.

Origen: https://eandt.theiet.org/2024/07/22/global-electricity-demand-set-rise-strongly-2024-and-2025-finds-iea-report