In 2025 renewables passed coal in the global mix for the first time in a century. Solar alone met three quarters of the year’s growth in demand.
France, 69%
The most nuclear-dependent grid of any large country, and the result is one of the lowest-carbon grids in the industrial world.
Norway, 90%
Hydro alone. Geography, not policy, is the deciding variable in the cleanest grids: Norway, Iceland, Brazil, Canada.
South Africa, 81%
The most coal-dependent grid in the sample, followed by India at 71% and Indonesia at 62%.
What the chart shows. Each bar is one country’s electricity generation broken into its sources, as a share of the total. Bar order defaults to total generation, so China and the United States sit at the top, but you can re-sort by any single source or by low-carbon share. Hover any country for the full breakdown and its absolute output in terawatt-hours. This is electricity only, not total primary energy, so it excludes transport fuel, industrial heat, and heating, which together are a larger share of world energy use than electricity is.
Geography still decides more than policy. The cleanest grids in the world are mostly not the product of climate ambition. Norway at 90 percent hydro, Iceland on hydro and geothermal, Brazil at 52 percent hydro, and Canada at 53 percent are all endowments. Where geography gave a country a river system or a volcanic field, it has a clean grid and always did. Where it did not, decarbonisation is a genuine cost. France is the interesting exception, because 69 percent nuclear was a deliberate state program built in two decades after the 1973 oil shock, and it remains the only large industrial economy to have decarbonised its grid by choice rather than by luck.
The scarcinality reading. Electricity is the one commodity where the physical scarcity and the monetary scarcity have almost fully decoupled. Wind and sunlight have no fuel cost at all: once the capital is spent, the marginal cost of the next unit is near zero. Coal and gas have a real, recurring input cost. So a grid’s composition determines which kind of scarcity binds it. A country running on gas is exposed to a fuel price set in a global market it does not control, which is what made 2022 a crisis in Europe and merely an inconvenience in Norway. A country running on hydro and nuclear has converted a recurring real scarcity into a one-time financial one: it paid capital up front to escape a permanent fuel bill. That is the same trade the framework describes throughout, moving a binding constraint from the layer where it recurs to the layer where it can be financed, and it is the strongest argument for building generation that has no fuel input, independent of any argument about carbon.
Data: Our World in Data energy dataset, drawn from Ember and the Energy Institute Statistical Review. Figures are 2025 except Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Iceland (2024, most recent available). Shares are rounded and may not sum to exactly 100. “Other” covers geothermal, tidal, and waste heat, and is the bulk of Iceland’s non-hydro generation.