As the world’s only crowd-sourced report on renewable energy, the Renewables 2022 Global Status Report (GSR) is in a class of its own. It covers policies, markets, and much more, while telling the most up-to-date global story on renewable energy.

Since 2005, the GSR has worked with its many contributors to put the spotlight on ongoing developments and emerging trends that shape the future of renewable energy. Producing this report each year is a truly collaborative effort of hundreds of expert and amateur volunteers contributing data, reviewing chapters and co-authoring the report.

The 2022 GSR report presents an amazing observation: Although renewable energy has once again achieved record growth, the energy transformation has not occurred, and this has nothing to do with the Russian Ukrainian conflict this year. The report believes that the world is about to miss the historic opportunity of clean energy recovery. In addition to the stagnant share of renewable energy in global energy use, the increase in energy consumption and fossil fuel use last year exceeded the growth of renewable energy. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has further exacerbated the global energy crisis. While a large number of fossil fuel companies have made huge profits, billions of people are facing the threat of energy poverty.

Although the hope of green recovery has been seen worldwide after the COVID-19 epidemic, this historic opportunity seems to have been lost. The clear warning issued by GSR 2022 shows that the global clean energy transformation is progressing slowly, which makes it unlikely that the world will achieve key climate goals by 2030. The new energy crisis and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine have led to an unprecedented impact on global commodities, which further exacerbated the difficulty of achieving a green recovery.

The report of GSR in 2022 is the 17th edition of the study. The proportion of renewable energy in the world’s final energy consumption is still stagnant – from 8.7% in 2009 to 11.7% in 2019 – the transformation of the global energy system to renewable energy has not occurred.

The installed capacity of renewable energy power generation (314.5 GW, an increase of 17% over 2020) and power generation (7793 TWH) in the power sector all recorded record growth, but still unable to meet the 6% overall power consumption growth. In terms of heating and cooling, the share of renewable energy in final energy consumption increased from 8.9% in 2009 to 11.2% in 2019. In the transportation sector, the share of renewable energy rose from 2.4% in 2009 to 3.7% in 2019. The lack of progress in the power sector is worrying because it accounts for nearly one third of global energy consumption.

The installed capacity of renewable energy has indeed reached a record level.

The share of renewable energy in total global energy consumption has stagnated.

Source: REN21