In 2025 the world installed 800 gigawatts of renewables in a single year

What improved. In 2025 annual additions of renewable capacity worldwide rose to 800 gigawatts, the highest ever recorded. Solar photovoltaic contributed 75% of that total. This is the figure published in the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review 2026, also reported by REGlobal.

The result has a consequence that changes the sector’s hierarchy: cumulative solar photovoltaic capacity reached about 2,800 gigawatts, making it the technology with the largest installed capacity in the world. Not the largest in terms of electricity produced — these are different measures, since a solar plant only produces when there is light — but in terms of installed power.

Wind is growing too: annual additions increased by nearly 40% globally, with a new record of around 160 gigawatts. And the piece needed to make intermittently produced energy usable is growing: battery storage increased by about 40% in 2025, reaching almost 110 gigawatts of new installations — more than the annual historical record set by natural gas.

Technology	2025 additions
Total renewables	800 GW
of which solar photovoltaic	75% of total
Wind	about 160 GW (+about 40%)
Battery storage	almost 110 GW (+about 40%)
Solar photovoltaic, cumulative capacity	about 2,800 GW

For whom. The benefit is not evenly distributed, and the report shows this in detail for Europe: the European Union added nearly 85 gigawatts of new renewable capacity in 2025, a record and about 10% more than in 2024, of which almost 70 gigawatts was solar. This means the Union contributed a fraction of the world total: the bulk of the 800 gigawatts was installed elsewhere.

For the year under review, the agency records a shift that affects all energy consumers: for the first time a modern renewable source covered the largest share of the growth in global energy demand. This is the difference between adding renewables to a system that keeps expanding on fossil fuels and adding enough of them to meet that growth.

How we know this, and with what limits. The primary source is the annual report of an intergovernmental agency, independent of the equipment manufacturers that benefit from it: this is not an industry press release. A comparison with a second institution, however, shows how much these numbers depend on methodology. Irena, using a different methodology, estimates 692 gigawatts of new renewables for 2025 and an overall global capacity of 5,149 gigawatts, according to the Renewable Capacity Statistics 2026.

Eight hundred versus 692 gigawatts: the gap between the two estimates measures the uncertainty that accompanies any global tally of this kind, and depends on what is included — which technologies, which size thresholds, which commissioning date.

Two clarifications close the picture. Installed capacity is not delivered electricity: a solar gigawatt and a gas gigawatt produce different amounts of energy over the course of a year. And these figures concern what has already been built in 2025, not targets or announcements: which is why they appear in this column.