India's power-sector emissions flat

 

From Carbon Brief

A surge in clean energy has kept carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in check across India’s power sector, with no growth from the first half of 2024 to the same period in 2026.

This is the first time in more than 50 years that there has been no growth in India’s coal power over a two-year period, even as electricity demand grew overall.

At the same time, both oil and gas consumption have fallen across the nation for two years in a row, helping alleviate the shock of the Hormuz crisis.

Nevertheless, the new six-monthly analysis for Carbon Brief shows that India’s [total] emissions grew by 3.7% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, due to increases from steel, cement and other sectors.

Other key findings for the first half of 2026 include:

• India’s power-sector emissions flatlined at 2024 levels, after a 2.2% decline in the first half of 2025 and a 2.3% rise in the same period this year.
• Clean energy met all of the 7% rise in India’s electricity demand over the two years, adding 63 terawatt hours (TWh), equivalent to the total demand of Switzerland.
• India has added 77 gigawatts (GW) of solar in this two-year period, helping meet 60% of the rise in electricity demand overall.
• While fossil-fuel generation stagnated, generators added 8.5GW of new coal capacity, leading to fewer running hours and increased costs to electricity consumers.
• CO2 emissions from oil and gas fell by 7% year-on-year, extending a reduction that began in 2025, despite higher demand for road transport fuels.
• Steel and cement emissions grew by 8% year-on-year, reaching a 23% share of India’s total CO2 in the first half of 2026.

If the pace of India’s clean-energy expansion is to continue, it will need to upgrade its electricity grid, rapidly build out energy storage and boost the flexibility of coal power.

While clean-energy expansion is covering most or all of India’s power-demand growth, the fossil-fuel industry continues to pursue major capital investments.

This includes large amounts of new coal-power capacity, ambitious plans for the conversion of coal-to-chemicals and efforts to boost domestic coking coal production for the steel sector.

While CO2 output from the power sector is flat, with oil and gas in decline, India’s emissions still went up due to the contribution from industry.

India lags behind its competitors – including most large emerging economies – when it comes to electrifying its industrial sector.

Faster progress would enable clean electricity to substitute for fossil fuels in industry, as well as for power, offering the potential for India to cut its emissions overall.

[Read more here] 

 As you can see from the top chart, India's power-sector emissions have risen steadily for over 50 years, as you would expect from a rapidly growing economy.  The last time India's emissions from the power sector fell was during Covid.  This time, they've fallen at a time when India's economic growth rate has been high.   A peak in these emissions makes a peak in India's total emissions much easier to achieve.

It is striking that the two of the high growth middle-income developing economies, India and China, are on the brink of peak emissions.  Both countries have much lower per capita emissions than the US, with China emitting 9.9 tonnes per person per year, and India just 2.9, compared with the US's 17.5 and Germany's 7.8.  But they are the most populous countries on Earth, and what they do to cut emissions really matters.  So this is good news.

Global fossil fuel emissions to fall in 2026

 From Carbon Brief

Global fossil-fuel emissions are set to fall by around 0.5% in 2026 amid the fallout from the Hormuz crisis, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

The US-Iran war has severely disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, causing a spike in oil and gas prices that continues to ripple around the global economy.

Each month of disruption – and each new flashpoint, such as in Yemen – is increasing the incentive to switch to alternatives.

Those alternatives include coal, with the latest forecasts pointing to a 1.2% rise in coal demand this year – apparently supporting media claims of a “return to coal” in the wake of the crisis.

Yet Carbon Brief’s analysis shows the rise in emissions associated with this increased coal use, much of which is unrelated to Hormuz, is set to be more than offset by declines for oil and gas.

The estimated overall impact on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels in 2026 is shown in the figure below and amounts to a reduction of around 0.5% from 2025 levels.

(Fossil fuels account for two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions.)

The emissions estimates for each fossil fuel are based on the latest forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA) for coal, oil and gas, in light of the ongoing global energy crisis.

For example, the agency initially estimated that global coal demand would decline this year. In its 2025 coal report, published in mid-December, it said that declining coal demand in China would outweigh the impact of pro-coal policies under US president Donald Trump.

In contrast, the latest update, published in September 2026, said that global coal demand would rise by 1.2% in 2026, instead of the small decline that had been expected.

The report highlighted the boost to coal demand from higher gas prices in the wake of Hormuz. However, there are limits to this, because few countries can switch from gas to coal at large scale.

The IEA’s latest report also noted the role of a strong El Niño, which is pushing up the need for cooling and depressing hydropower output in key markets. Other short-term factors are also affecting coal demand this year, including a rising amount of “wasted” wind and solar in China.

For gas, the IEA did not initially update its previous forecast that global gas demand would rise by 2.0% in 2026, which had been published in January of this year.

Its most recent forecast – published in July – already pointed to a 0.6% drop in demand in 2026. Since then, pressure on gas demand from high prices has only grown stronger.

For oil, there has been an even more dramatic shift in forecasts since the start of the year.

In its January 2026 oil market report, the IEA forecast a rise in demand in 2026 of 930,000 barrels per day (bpd). As shown in the figure below, this has been steadily revised downwards over the course of the year, as the Hormuz crisis was first ignited – and then extended.

By September, the IEA was forecasting a 2,500,000bpd drop in oil demand in 2026, equivalent to a reduction of 2.4% from 2025 levels.

(A 15 September research note from Morgan Stanley, not available online, found a “consensus” forecast of a 2,415,000bpd drop in demand in 2026.)

 

While there are many short-term factors at play in the shifting forecasts for 2026, it is clear that the latest energy crisis will also affect fossil-fuel demand in the next year and beyond.

For example, whereas the IEA initially forecast that oil demand would rebound in 2027 to well above 2025 levels, it is now expecting use of the fuel to be effectively flat for two years.

This puts a question mark over its previous expectation – published in October last year – that global oil demand would not peak until as late as 2030.

“For every month the conflict lasts, the probability of permanent [oil] demand destruction increases,” wrote Sverre Alvik, vice president at consultancy DNV in a late August analysis.

As fuel prices have surged, electric vehicles (EVs) have captured record shares of major car markets, from Australia and China through to Europe, Indonesia and Thailand.

In July, EV sales nearly doubled year-on-year in “new markets”, noted Alvik, pointing to countries outside China, Europe and North America.

The IEA says the 2027 outlooks for coal and gas are interdependent, with coal demand potentially increasing again if gas prices remain elevated – or dropping back if gas prices ease.

At the same time, governments in countries that had planned to rely on imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) have been signalling shifts towards favouring domestic clean energy instead – or continuing to use coal for longer.

The current crisis, therefore, has the potential to not only lower fossil-fuel use and emissions in the short term, but also on a more lasting basis.

[Read more from Carbon Brief here]

 

Am I being too optimistic by believing that emissions have peaked?  China's emissions have flattened, and if they sort out their curtailment problem ("wasted" wind and solar) then their emissions will start falling.  The Iran war has created a massive incentive for individuals, companies and governments to switch to renewables.  The US has shown that it is unable to maintain open seas for oil transportation, which means that this disruption is likely to continue, even if there are temporary fluctuations in oil and gas prices, as rumours of peace talk rise and vanish.  At the same time, battery, solar and EV costs will continue to fall, increasing their appeal.  You have to buy oil every day, but cars last 15 years, batteries now last 20+, and solar panels 30+.  A once-off cost gives you free travel and electricity for decades. And, outside the US and China, EVs now have the same "sticker price" as petrol/diesel cars.

The switch will continue even after the Trump administration is history.

Solar capacity outpaces coal in China

 

Source: Our World in Data

From EuroNews

China's solar energy capacity has surpassed that of coal-fired power for the first time ever.

"As of the end of July this year, China's installed solar power capacity reached 1.286 billion kilowatts," China's National Energy Administration (NEA) said.

"For the first time, photovoltaic installed capacity surpassed coal-fired power, becoming the largest power source category in China," it added.

The country's coal-fired power installed capacity, the energy body said, stood at 1.285 billion kilowatts [1,285 GW — a typical coal power station is 1 to 2 GW]

Solar generation rose 15.5 per cent in the first seven months of 2026 compared to the same period last year to 802.4 billion kilowatt-hours, about one-eighth of the country's total, the NEA said in another statement.

China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases that drive climate change, has pledged to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

The NEA said China's installed solar power capacity and power generation "have maintained a steady trend of rapid growth," with it playing an "increasingly prominent role" in guaranteeing electricity supply and driving the energy transition.

Coal has been China's key power generation source for decades and a key driver of planet-warming emissions.

But the country's coal-fired power generation fell by nearly two per cent in 2025, despite rising energy demand in the world's largest emitter, data reviewed by the AFP news agency showed in February.

It marked the first decline in six years, with some analysts saying it was the first time on record that coal generation dropped at the same time as power demand rose.

China has seen an explosive growth in its renewable installation, with coal's share in its energy mix edging down in recent years.The country installed a record 315 gigawatts of solar power and 119 gigawatts of wind power capacity last year, over 80 per cent of total newly installed power generation capacity, according to the China Electricity Council.

EU countries are trailing behind China when it comes to renewables, partly because China started their transition to clean energy much sooner. [This seems incorrect. China's solar capacity on 2000 was just 0.03 GW, compared with 0.2 GW in Europe and 0.59 GW in the US.  China's capacity only exceeded Europe's in 2017.]  As an example, in 2023 China installed between 180 and 230 gigawatts of solar, compared to 58 gigawatts in all European countries combined.

China's ownership of clean technology parts and patents makes a big difference to how quickly and cheaply they can install, as well as cheaper labour.

China's energy grid is also more efficient at handling energy from multiple sources, where as Europe's grid has been called "outdated". Hybridisation has been recommended as a solution.

Remember, this is capacity, not output.   Solar output is constrained, often curtailed by the grid operator, because of excess capacity in coal.  China is still building coal power stations, despite low capacity factors, and electricity utilities have quotas to use coal power in preference to solar and wind.  For China to significantly reduce emissions, it will have to rejig the electricity market.  When it does, emissions should plummet.

China's emissions fall because of declining oil use

 From Gavin Mooney

China’s emissions fell again in Q2, but for the first time it was falling oil use that drove them down.

That matters because until now China’s emissions story has tended to be a coal story.

According to Lauri Myllyvirta’s latest analysis for Carbon Brief, China’s CO₂ emissions fell 1% year-on-year in Q2 2026. When emissions have fallen previously, lower coal consumption was the main driver. This time, it was oil doing the work.

Oil use fell 9% overall and 16% in transport amid the Strait of Hormuz crisis.

But this is also not just a temporary shock. Transport activity was broadly stable or still growing, which means the fall in fuel use was enabled by structural changes already underway.

A few things are happening at once:

✅ EVs are now displacing enough oil to matter at national scale
✅ Existing EVs were used more, with charging volumes up 60% in Q2
✅ Rail, metro systems and electric trucks are reducing demand for petrol and diesel

The less rosy part is coal.

Coal use in the power sector still rose 2.4%, partly because more wind and solar output was curtailed due to grid and market constraints. Recent five-year plan documents include measures to improve clean-power utilisation, but this remains one of the key bottlenecks.

So this is not yet a clean “China’s emissions have peaked” moment.

It is more nuanced than that. China’s emissions have really been on a plateau since early 2024, with small moves up and down.

What is significant is that the pressure is now coming from more than one direction.

Until recently, the key question was whether clean electricity could reduce coal use fast enough to bring emissions down. Now oil demand is starting to pull in the same direction.

If coal and oil eventually start falling together, China’s emissions plateau could become a much clearer decline.

Read the Carbon Brief article here.

Chinese emissions peaking now; India's soon

Another telling chart from Carbon Brief

Let's first look at China.  

The height of the bars shows the total increase in the demand for electricity, each year, in TWh (terawatt-hours). One TWh = 1000 GWh (Gigawatt-hours) or 1 million MWh (Megawatt-hours).  

So in 2020, Covid caused low growth in total demand, and this was mostly met by renewables.  But in 2021, demand rebounded strongly as Covid lockdowns were partially removed, with the result that only a third of the increase was met by renewables.   Excluding the jump in demand in 2021, the rise in electricity demand each year over the last 3 years is the highest it's been.   And each of those three years, the percentage supplied by renewables has risen, and in 2025 it exceeded 100%.  

Economic growth will increase electricity demand each year, on average, but the key point is that non-fossil supply growth (30% per annum) is much faster than total demand.  Now that it's reached parity, the gap will widen.  Renewables will more and more rapidly eat into coal's market share. 

If you add the S-curve acceleration of EV sales, it is clear that China's emissions have peaked.  Which means world emissions have peaked too, though don't expect a rapid plunge — yet.

India's story is a bit different.  Yes, renewables filled more than 100% of the increase in demand last year, but that's because demand growth was low (due to an early-onset monsoon reducing temperatures below previous years', meaning less air conditioning was needed).  India's growth in electricity demand is about 85 TWh per annum, but is expected to increase, while the increase in supply from renewables was just 71 TWh.  So if the summer heat is typical this year, supply from coal will increase, meaning emissions will increase.  But the growth rate in renewables is much higher than the growth rate in demand.  These lines will soon cross over again.

Here's what Carbon Brief says:

India added 35GW of solar, 6GW wind and 3.5GW hydropower [capacity] in the first 11 months of 2025, with renewable energy capacity additions picking up 44% year-on-year.

Power generation from non-fossil sources grew 71TWh, led by solar at 33TWh, while total generation increased 21TWh, similarly pushing down power generation from coal and gas.

The increase in clean power is, however, below the average demand growth recorded from 2019 to 2024, at 85TWh per year, as well as below the projection for 2026-30.

This means that clean-energy growth would need to accelerate in order for coal power to see a structural peak and decline in output, rather than a short-term blip.

Meeting the government’s target for 500GW of non-fossil power capacity by 2030, set by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi in 2021, requires just such an acceleration.

CREA (Centre for Research on Energy and Clear Air)  believes that China's emissions from electricity have peaked, and India's will peak in 2028.  I concur.

However, CREA points out:

[...]one major obstacle common across China, India, and Indonesia is the continued addition of new coal-fired power plants and mining capacity. The new clean energy infrastructures being built in each country creates powerful resistance from the coal industry, which will only intensify once coal demand begins to contract. This political and economic inertia threatens to slow the clean energy transition and lock in high-carbon energy systems in these countries for decades to come, making a rapid post-peak decline in emissions far from guaranteed.

The continued fall in the costs of solar panels and batteries will be a powerful countervailing force, because of course, coal is not getting any cheaper, but governments in all three countries would be wise to ban all new coal power stations immediately.  They won't be needed.

Have China's emissions peaked?

 From Carbon Brief

China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months, starting in March 2024. This trend continued in the third quarter of 2025, when emissions were unchanged year-on-year.

This picture is finely balanced, however, with contrasting trends in different sectors of the economy underlying the ongoing plateau in CO2 emissions, shown in the figure below.

China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement, million tonnes of CO2, rolling 12-month totals until September 2025. Source: Emissions are estimated from National Bureau of Statistics data on production of different fuels and cement, China Customs data on imports and exports and WIND Information data on changes in inventories, applying emissions factors from China’s latest national greenhouse gas emissions inventory and annual emissions factors per tonne of cement production until 2024. Sector breakdown of coal consumption is estimated using coal consumption data from WIND Information and electricity data from the National Energy Administration. The consumption of petrol, diesel and jet fuel is adjusted to match quarterly totals estimated by Sinopec.

Reminder: There were covid lockdowns in 2020 and again in 2022 and 2023

Emissions from the production of cement and other building materials fell by 7% in the third quarter of 2025, while emissions from the metals industry fell 1%. This is due to the ongoing real-estate contraction, as the construction sector uses most of the country’s steel and cement output.

Emission reductions from steel production continued to lag the reductions in output, which fell 3%. This is because the fall in demand was absorbed by the lower-carbon electric-arc steelmakers, whereas carbon-intensive coal-based steel production was less affected.

China has struggled to increase the share of electric-arc steelmaking despite targets, due to the large capacity base and entrenched position of coal-based steelmaking crowding out the lower-emission producers.

Power-sector emissions were unchanged year-on-year in the third quarter, as strong growth from solar and wind generation, along with small increases from nuclear and hydro, nearly matched a rapid rise in demand.

Emissions from transport fell by 5% over the period, but oil consumption in other sectors grew by 10%, driven by chemical industry expansion. This resulted in a 2% rise in oil consumption overall.

Gas demand and emissions grew by 3% overall in the three-month period, with consumption in the power sector up by 9% and by 2% in other sectors.

In the power sector, China’s dominant source of CO2, emissions remained flat in the third quarter even as electricity demand grew strongly.

Electricity generation from solar and wind grew by 30%, with solar up 46% and wind power generation increasing 11%. With small increases from nuclear and hydropower, non-fossil power sources covered almost 90% of the increase in demand, even as demand growth accelerated to 6.1% in the third quarter, up from 3.7% in the first half of the year.

This is illustrated in the figure below, where the columns show the change in generation by each source of non-fossil power every quarter and the line shows the increase in electricity demand.

 

Columns: Year-on-year change in quarterly electricity generation from clean energy excluding hydro, terawatt hours. Solid and dashed line: Quarterly and average change in total electricity generation, TWh. Sources: China Electricity Council; Ember; analysis for Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta.

The steady rise in renewables (bars) shown in the last chart contrasts with the big fluctuations in demand (grey line).  Part of the rise in demand in the latest quarter was due to electricity needed for air conditioning, because of near-record summer heat.  It's possible that demand growth will outpace the growth in supply from renewables next year.  But that will probably be the last time this happens, as the rise in output from renewables continues to increase.  

China's CO2 emissions won't drop fast for now.  But the fact that they have stabilised, or perhaps even peaked, means that world emissions have prolly peaked too, because China is responsible for 1/3rd of global emissions.  

Source: Our World in Data

As developing countries embrace EVs and solar, because they are cheap and getting cheaper, emissions will decline.  What about the USA and Trump?  Yes, de-carbonisation there is likely coming to a juddering halt.  But the country is only responsible for 13% of global emissions.  Everywhere else, driven by economics, renewables are winning the race.

Don't get too excited.  We have to cut CO2 emissions to near zero to stop temperatures rising.  We're a long way from that, though we have at least started down that road.  We need to speed it up if we are to avoid 3 degrees of temperature rise by 2100.  Cutting emissions by at least 5% a year should be our target.  If we did that, we'd cut emissions by 75% by 2050, which would be where they were in 1960.

The true climate impact of aviation

From Carbon Brief

 

Data for 2018 shows the global population flying more frequently – and over longer distances than ever before – with nearly 38m scheduled flights, carrying 4.3bn passengers over a total of 54bn km. Aviation has been growing at around 5% per year before 2020.

But what is the climate cost of all these flights? The oft-quoted figure is that aviation accounts for around 2% of global CO2 emissions. Yet, the impact of aviation on the climate goes beyond just CO2 and its emissions have complicated interactions in the atmosphere that can reinforce the warming impact.

Aviation’s climate impacts have been studied for many years, including a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1999, but rarely are all the results pulled together to produce such a comprehensive analysis and assessment based on the best available science.

Published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, we – along with 19 other scientists around the world – recently produced an updated analysis of the present-day climate impacts of aviation.

We find that, when all its impacts are taken into account, aviation represents around 3.5% of the warming impact caused by humans in the present day.

Below, we unpack this headline result of the study and describe a little of the context.

[Read more here]

For simplicity, I will assume in future that the GHG emissions from aviation are ~4% of the total.  Of course, as emissions from other sources fall, the percentage will increase.