The race to a clean, electrified future is on
Ember Current – June 2026 Newsletter
It’s a warm lunch time as I write this. The UK has recorded its highest ever May temperature this week. The northern hemisphere is rattling towards the summer solstice, as the planet spins towards one of the hottest years on record. Carbon emissions continue, as does chaos in the fossil fuel markets, but this is contrasted with more hopeful stories about the rise of new, cleaner industries. Our latest report in the UK highlights that 15% of power generation is already fully independent of the price of gas thanks to clean power, and we forecast this to rise to a third (36%) by 2030.
As the fossil fuel crisis continues, the need for a rapid reduction in oil and gas demand becomes more glaringly obvious. Luckily, clean alternatives are cheaper and more available than ever before. The summer solstice is solar power’s time to shine. While the sun shines longest on the solstice, investing in batteries means solar power can also be delivered after the sun sets – cutting oil and gas demand further. The race is on.
Insights, analyses and commentaries
My top picks
As the race to deploy clean, electrified and efficient alternatives to oil and gas continues, the electricity grid remains an essential foundation. Grid bottlenecks or outdated infrastructure can prevent renewable energy from being fully utilised and can make electricity systems vulnerable to extreme weather. I’ve chosen three electricity grid-related pieces from our recent research to highlight here, weaving together a story of transmission infrastructure upgrades in a changing world.
Transmission gaps are beginning to constrain India’s rapid renewables integration
Grid capacity is essential to incorporating new clean generation. However, India has met only about 80% of its annual transmission targets over the past five years, and one in four major schemes is a year or more behind schedule. Reactive rather than proactive investment is contributing to long connection queues and rising curtailment, compounded by geographic concentration of wind and solar in certain key regions. Longer-term transmission planning is crucial, and batteries may also be a source of near-term relief.
Germany’s battery opportunity
Speaking of batteries, we published a report last month highlighting Europe’s largest battery market, Germany, which hosts 25% of the continent’s battery capacity. It’s in the residential space where things are truly taking off – roughly one in six homeowners already have storage installed, and 30% of homeowners are considering buying a battery storage system within the next five years.
Rewiring Resilience: AI for Climate-Adaptive Power Grids in Asia-Pacific
security
As well as new generation types and locations, national and international electricity grids need to adapt to new extreme weather threats, too. Our report on Climate-Adaptive Power Grids in Asia-Pacific details how better data and monitoring is essential to operate resilient grids at scale. Heatwaves, bushfires and typhoons for example can each lead to line damage, unplanned outages and reduced capacity.
There’s more!
- British power prices are increasingly independent from gas | Read the report
- Understanding India’s coal mine methane landscape | Read the report
- Global Coal Mine Methane Review 2026 | Read the report
Ember in the news
- Unreported Coal Mine Methane Imperils Climate Action, Ember Says | Bloomberg
- Have We Reached a Turning Point for Fossil Electricity? | CGTN Europe
- The electric car boom in South East Asia | The Climate Question | BBC Audio
What I’m reading
Visual storytelling corner
Chart of the month
For the first time, every single OECD country is generating less electricity from fossil fuels than at its historical peak. Laying out all 38 member states, ordered by how far each has fallen from its peak, makes the milestone tangible. The dark fossil fuel mass shrinking over time, combined with the green wind and solar layer rising to replace it, tell the story at a glance, but there are so many different data stories in the detail. Because the chart doesn’t flatten these differences into a single global number, we can see the differences in scale and the diversity in journeys between Iceland and Costa Rica compared to Poland and the United States. But even where fossil fuels remain dominant, the trend lines are unmistakably pointing in the same direction.
Turning data into action
Data highlights
April 2026 was the first month ever where wind and solar generated more electricity than gas globally
Together, wind and solar generated 22% of global electricity in April 2026, compared with 20% from gas. Read our press release here.
In April 2026, wind and solar generated more electricity than coal in Türkiye for the first time
Wind and solar produced a combined 22.8% of electricity against coal’s 21%. Dig into the data in our electricity data explorer.
Country spotlight
Germany is the EU leader when it comes to utility scale battery deployment, with over 2.5 GW of large-scale battery capacity operational by the end of 2025 and a pipeline exceeding 10 GW. However, the forthcoming Electricity Supply Security and Capacity Act (StromVKG), whose current draft gives preferential treatment to gas in capacity auctions, risks slower battery deployment and prolonged fossil fuel import dependency. The economic case clearly favours batteries, though. Had that pipeline been operational in 2025, it could have avoided roughly one-third of the around 8 TWh of wind and solar curtailment, saving ~€0.8 billion in costs to consumers, which would have exceeded the investment required. What’s missing is a clean flexibility strategy that gives batteries, demand-side flexibility and smarter grid infrastructure equal standing in policy and auction design.
