Solar is now the largest source of global energy-demand growth

For the first time, solar supplied the largest share of global energy-demand growth (>25%), while all low-emissions sources together delivered nearly 60%. The energy transition is increasingly shaping not just electricity, but the marginal source of global energy growth.

The significance of this shift is easy to understate. For most of the modern era, growth in energy demand was met mainly by adding fossil fuel supply. When the marginal unit of new demand is met by solar and other low-emissions sources, the emissions intensity of growth itself starts to fall, even before existing fossil assets are retired.

For companies with large Scope 3 footprints, the practical lesson is that the cheapest reductions in a value chain are increasingly found in how suppliers source power. Insetting gives buyers a way to co-finance that switch at supplier sites and to claim the verified reduction inside their own reporting boundary.