CITRES Digest

From the Editor

This spring tested a proposition at the heart of the transition: that it is bigger than any one government. In the same season the United States formally left the Paris Agreement, the world logged its largest renewable buildout ever, and fifty-seven nations gathered in a Colombian coal port to plan, for the first time, life after fossil fuels.

Chaofeng Wang, Editor

Another Record Year: Renewables Near the Halfway Mark

When IRENA released its Renewable Capacity Statistics 2026 in March, the numbers confirmed that 2025 was the biggest year yet for renewable power: 692 GW added, a 15.5% increase and the highest annual growth on record in both absolute and percentage terms, the third consecutive year this digest has reported a new record. Global renewable capacity now stands at 5,149 GW. Solar supplied 511 GW of the additions, roughly three-quarters, pushing total solar capacity to about 2.4 TW; wind added 159 GW. The geography is familiar: Asia accounted for 74% of new capacity, and the concentration we flagged in Issue No. 2 has not eased.

But the headline is the threshold. Sometime this year or next, renewables become the majority of the world's installed power capacity, a symbolic crossing with practical consequences. The research frontier shifts accordingly, from whether renewables scale to how grids, industries, and communities absorb them: storage, flexibility, transmission, market design, and who shares in the value. Capacity was the easy thing to count. Integration is where the next decade's problems live.

Paris Minus One, Santa Marta Plus Fifty-Seven

Washington. On January 27, the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement took legal effect: the formal end of the one-year notice that began on inauguration day 2025, as chronicled in our last two issues. The US now stands outside the pact alongside only Iran, Libya, and Yemen. The practical effects have been accumulating for a year; the legal fact matters mostly for what it signals about the durability of treaty commitments across election cycles, a question every long-horizon investor in the transition now has to price.

Santa Marta, Colombia. The season's more novel diplomatic event ran the other way. On April 28–29, Colombia and the Netherlands co-hosted the first international conference devoted exclusively to transitioning away from fossil fuels, held pointedly in one of Colombia's major coal ports. Fifty-seven states attended, picking up the thread that COP30's final text dropped and working through the practical dimensions the UN process has never had room for: subsidy reform, trade, macroeconomic stability, energy security, and labour transitions. It is the first time producer and consumer countries have sat down to treat phase-out as a design problem rather than a slogan.

Both stories vindicate the same design principle. When treaty-level consensus stalls, progress migrates to coalitions of the willing and to the levels where most of the real work happens anyway: states and cities, industrial partnerships, community energy finance, and the international research pipeline that keeps lessons flowing whatever the diplomatic weather. The question Santa Marta leaves behind is whether a coalition of 57 can build the machinery (finance, trade rules, transition funds) that makes joining more attractive than staying out.

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