Annual global renewable energy capacity additions will need to almost double to 1.2TW between 2026 and 2030 if the world is to meet the energy transition targets set out at the COP28 summit in 2023.
This is the headline takeaway from ‘Delivering on the UAE Consensus: Tracking progress toward tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling energy efficiency by 2030’, the latest report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA); the ‘UAE Consensus’ is the group of targets agreed upon at COP28 that include, among other goals, tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030.
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The report notes that the world added 693GW of new renewable energy capacity in 2025, bringing cumulative operational capacity to 5.15TW, which equals a 15.5% growth rate over capacity additions in 2024. This growth rate is marginally higher than the 15.1% growth rate in capacity additions between 2023 and 2024, but IRENA notes that this rate of additions will not be sufficient to meet the 11.2TW cumulative installation target set by the UAE Consensus.
Indeed, should the current year-on-year growth rate continue to increase at a rate of 0.4 percentage points a year, global cumulative renewable energy additions will reach 10.6TW by 2030, leaving a shortfall of around 600GW, which the report notes is almost equivalent to the 612GW of operational renewable energy capacity in North America as of the end of 2024.
Solar growth potential makes 2030 targets ‘feasible’
The report expects solar PV to play a leading role in the meeting of the 2030 targets. Should cumulative renewable energy capacity installations reach 11.2TW, renewables would account for 62% of all installed power capacity, up from 35% in 2025. IRENA expects solar PV to account for 42% of this 2030 capacity figure, more than any other renewable energy technology.
Indeed, the IRENA report notes that solar PV accounted for three-quarters of new renewable energy capacity additions in 2025, with 513GW of new capacity added. These figures are lower than those published by SolarPower Europe, but it remains clear that solar PV accounts for the majority of new renewable energy capacity additions; according to IRENA figures, solar PV accounted for 46.3% of installed renewable energy capacity in 2025, ahead of hydropower (25.1%) and wind (25%).
Crucially, the report notes that solar PV is well-positioned for future growth, saying that the industry could drive new renewable energy capacity additions and make the achievement of the 2030 goals “feasible”. The report attributes to this to “the shorter permitting period, widespread public acceptance, mature supply chain and ultimate cost-competitiveness of the technology,” but notes that stronger and more “agile” policy support will be needed “to match the momentum of solar deployment”.
“Renewable energy records are being smashed year after year as the clean energy revolution accelerates,” said UN secretary-general António Guterres. “But we must go further and faster to clear the bottlenecks that delay the transition, drive investment to developing countries and break our addiction to volatile fossil fuels once and for all.”
Grid investments need to double to US$1 trillion a year
A key obstacle to further renewable energy additions is a lack of grid capacity, which has left many renewable energy projects announced, but left stranded as they wait for a grid connection.
The IRENA report points to International Energy Agency (IEA) figures that estimate that around 2.5TW of renewable energy capacity at “advances stages” of development are waiting for grid connection queues, which has put hundreds of gigawatts of renewable energy capacity in Europe at risk and resulted in a plethora of projects in the US completely withdrawing from the connection queue before securing grid access.
Figures from think tank Ember suggest that the problem could be even more pronounced in Europe, reporting that over 700GW of renewable energy projects remain stuck in connection queues.
The report also notes that curtailment is a challenge for a number of energy systems around the world, and the addition of more renewable energy capacity without parallel grid expansion could make this problem worse. In Europe, Germany, France and the Netherlands saw a 21% year-on-year increase in curtailment in 2025, while in the UK, wind curtailment alone increased almost threefold between 2025 and 2025. Elsewhere, curtailment has increased for both wind and solar PV in China for two consecutive years, while curtailment hours represent almost 14% of the potential generation of variable renewable energy technologies in Chile.
The IRENA report says that grid limitations have been “key drivers” of the growth of curtailment, although other factors like system constraints have had an impact.
The result of these connection delays, and the looming threat of curtailment, means that the world’s grids will require significant expansion, and investment, in order to accommodate the new renewable energy capacity that will need to come online to meet the 2030 renewable energy targets. Specifically, IRENA estimates that US$1 trillion in annual grid investments will be needed between 2026 and 2030, more than double the US$450 billion invested in 2025.
At this year’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe event, hosted in London by PV Tech publisher Solar Media, industry experts suggested that private investment could be necessary to finance the grid expansion necessary to facilitate the energy transition, considering the vast scale of the investment required. But this is not to say that national government have shied away from these investments; last week, Spain announced plans for a US$19.5 billion grid investment, alongside the launch of a capacity market in the country.
The report also points to the ‘Global Energy Storage and Grids Pledge’, which was issued at the COP29 summit in 2024 and includes goals such as the addition of over 25 million kilometres of transmission and distribution lines and 1.5TW of battery energy storage systems (BESS) globally.
The report argues that BESS could be a key technology to enable the energy transition, calling it “the fastest scaled-up flexibility solution for power systems in the past few years.”
“IRENA’s revised roadmap makes it clear: we need to move faster, electrify faster and build the systems to support it,” added IRENA director-general Francesco La Camera. “That means rapidly scaling and modernising renewable generation, grids, storage and flexibility. Electrification with renewables is one of the most powerful policy levers to accelerate and drive further action.”
