From the Editor
One number went up that should not have; another went up faster than ever before. This issue is about holding both in view at once, and about two governments that looked at the same facts this winter and walked off in opposite directions. Use-inspired research has to be useful in the world as it is, not as we wish it were; rarely has "as it is" been this contradictory.
Chaofeng Wang, Editor
The Paradox of 2024: Record Heat, Record Renewables
The warmest year ever measured was also the fastest year of clean energy buildout in history. Both facts are true; neither cancels the other.
In January, the Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that 2024 was the warmest year on record and the first calendar year to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, at roughly 1.6°C. A single year above 1.5°C does not mean the Paris Agreement threshold, a long-term average, has been breached, but the direction of travel is unambiguous: every one of the ten warmest years on record has now occurred in the past ten years.
Two months later, IRENA closed the books on the other record. The world added 585 GW of renewable capacity in 2024, the largest annual increase ever, 15.1% growth in a single year, with solar and wind making up 96.6% of net additions. Global renewable capacity reached 4,448 GW, roughly 46% of all installed power capacity on Earth. The buildout has stopped being a sector story and become a macroeconomic one: more than 17 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide in 2024 (about one in five new cars), and battery pack prices fell 20% in a year, to around $115/kWh, the steepest drop since 2017.
The paradox dissolves once timescales are separated. Warming responds to cumulative emissions; capacity records measure the rate of replacement. The replacement, though faster than ever, is still not fast enough. Even 2024's record pace falls short of the roughly 16.6% annual growth needed to meet the COP28 pledge of tripling renewables by 2030. And the growth is lopsided: nearly two-thirds of the new capacity went up in China alone, while much of the developing world added almost none. The question is no longer whether renewables can scale. It is whether they can scale everywhere, for everyone, in time.
Two Governments, Opposite Directions
Washington reverses
On its first day in office in January, the new US administration announced withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for the second time (effective January 27, 2026, under the treaty's one-year notice rule), declared a national energy emergency, halted new federal offshore wind leasing, and began reviewing clean energy spending under the Inflation Reduction Act, including the industrial demonstration grants we covered in Issue No. 1. The reversal arrives with the market mid-stride: solar and storage made up more than 80% of new US generating capacity in 2024.
Westminster accelerates
Weeks earlier, the UK had published its Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, mapping a route to a largely decarbonized power system by the end of the decade, a pace no major economy has attempted, backed by grid connection and planning reform, the new publicly owned Great British Energy headquartered in Aberdeen, and the onshore wind revival begun last summer. Eighteen months after retiring coal, the UK has moved from phase-out to buildout.
For researchers, divergence is not only a challenge; it is a natural experiment. Two large economies will now run opposite policies against the same technology costs, and the results will teach the field more than either could alone. When national policies swing, durable progress shifts to the levels where much of the real work happens anyway: states and cities, community energy financing, industrial partnerships, and the research pipeline that outlasts any single administration.
After Baku: The $300 Billion Question
Our first issue previewed COP29 as “the finance COP.” It delivered a number, and an argument. In the summit's final hours, nations agreed on a New Collective Quantified Goal of at least $300 billion per year for developing countries by 2035, within a broader call to mobilize $1.3 trillion a year from public and private sources. Developing countries criticized the core figure as far short of need (several delegations called it an insult), and the gap between the two numbers is now the defining problem of climate finance. Baku also finalized the Article 6 rulebook for international carbon markets, nearly a decade after Paris created it. How to make private capital flow to transitions in places public money cannot reach is precisely where innovative financing research must prove itself.
The Season in Dates
- November 2024 COP29 in Baku closes with the $300 billion finance goal and, at last, a finished Article 6 carbon market rulebook.
- December 2024 The UK publishes Clean Power 2030. BloombergNEF reports battery pack prices down 20% on the year.
- January 2025 Copernicus confirms 2024 as the first full year above 1.5°C. In Washington, day-one orders begin the second Paris withdrawal.
- March 2025 IRENA confirms the record: 585 GW added in 2024, renewables now 46% of global installed capacity.
Looking Ahead
Climate diplomacy heads to the Amazon this November for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, the first COP held in the rainforest the negotiations are partly about. Attention turns from pledging to delivery: countries' new 2035 national climate plans are due this year, and the finance machinery agreed in Baku needs a roadmap to $1.3 trillion.
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