The extreme temperatures recorded last year fed the demand for air conditioning, which in turn led to an increase in the production of “dirty” coal energy in a dangerous retroactive cycle revealed by a new study by the International Energy Agency.
The increase in World energy search He shot last year, causing an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, even with renewable energy and nuclear energy to provide most of the new electricity production capacity.
The International Energy Agency reported a 2.2% increase in global energy demand last year, almost twice the average of 1.3% per year in the decade until 2023. However, the use of electricity increased by 4.3%, driven by the greater demand of data centers, electric cars and, namely, the air conditioners.
As Extreme climatic conditionsIn particular, heat vacancies in China, India and the United States, were the source of a fifth of the increase in the demand for natural gas and electricity last year and a total increase of 123 million tons (1.4%) in the volume of burned coal, especially in the electrical centers, said the intergovernment agency based in Paris.
“Heat waves worldwide, in turn, have increased the growth of the demand for electricity, which in turn drives, in some countries like China and India, the growth of coal consumption,” said the president of AIE, Fatih Birol, to journalists during the 2025 edition of Global Energy Review.
This clear trend led AIE to abandon, at the end of last year, its prognosis that coal consumption would reach its maximum in the near future, with the global demand to reach 8.7 billion tons in 2024.
All this means that, although renewable energy, such as solar energy and wind, cover 38% of the additional demand for energy worldwide, and nuclear energy contributes to 8%, reaching a world production record, more than half of the increase was satisfied by a combination of coal, oil and gas, which was reflected in a 0.8% increase in energy -related carbon emissions.
Although this value represents only about two thirds of the increase rate recorded in the previous year, the trend continues to increase clearly, once again in question the general appetite due to climate action and the objective of void emissions, which the scientific consensus suggests being as much as necessary to conclude by increasing temperatures.
“If we want to find a positive side, we find that there is a continuous dissociation between economic growth and emissions growth,” said Laura Cozzi, who leads AIE’s work on energy sustainability and was the main author of the report. The world economy grew 3.2% last year, considerably more than the global use of energy, returning to an average in the long term after some turbulence of the Covid era.
In addition, the world seems to be in a good way to fulfill the commitment made at the COP28 climate summit, held in Dubai in 2023, tripling the renewable energy implementation rate at the end of the decade, Cozzi said. “In the case of renewable energy, we are very, very close: we have approximately 2.7 (times) to increase by 2030”.
But, as the latest AIE report shows, the same is not true for the commitment to double the annual rate for the improvement of energy efficiency, an indicator of demand reduction, also agreed on the World Summit on the climate that the UN greeted as the “end of the end” of the era of fossil fuels.
“If we look at last year’s trends instead of a duplication, we saw a reduction in half,” Cozzi said.
