The world’s electricity demand is expected to surge by 30% over the next decade as data centers, electric vehicles, and demand for heating and cooling drive increased consumption, a new report by Rystad Energy says.
Renewable power generation, especially solar energy, is expected to be crucial to meeting the electricity demand growth, found the report cited by Bloomberg.
Renewable energy is forecast to provide 55% of all electricity globally by 2035, raising its share from 34% today, according to the energy intelligence company.
Surging power demand in both developed and emerging economies accelerated global energy demand growth in 2024 to nearly twice the pace of recent years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said earlier this year.
Record-high temperatures, higher demand from industry and for electrification, and AI and data centers contributed to a 4.3% rise in global power consumption last year, the IEA said in its annual report Global Energy Review 2025.
The rise in power demand last year was nearly double the annual average over the past decade.
“What is certain is that electricity use is growing rapidly, pulling overall energy demand along with it to such an extent that it is enough to reverse years of declining energy consumption in advanced economies,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.
In a separate report this week, energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie said that soaring power demand and mounting geopolitical tensions have made 2050 net zero goals unattainable. The world is currently on track for a 2.6°C global warming, WoodMac’s Energy Transition Outlook 2025-2026 report found.
“As power demand surges due to the expansion of technologies such as AI and electrification, what was once a mostly aspirational shift towards decarbonization is now facing the hard trade-offs of scale, system integration, capital allocation and geopolitics,” said Prakash Sharma, vice president, head of scenarios and technologies for Wood Mackenzie.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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