Chapter 02 — The electricity baseline
Data centers are arriving in an electricity system already under pressure.
World electricity demand roughly doubled over the past 25 years, reaching 30,913 TWh in 2024. Clean generation grew, but not fast enough to produce an absolute global decline in fossil generation.
World generation by fuel
Global generation has expanded across multiple fuels; renewable growth has not yet eliminated fossil generation at the margin.
The largest electricity systems
Electricity use is highly concentrated, making the transition paths of the largest national grids globally consequential.
Generation by continent
Regional trajectories reveal that the geography of electricity growth is as important as its global total.
Generation in the top 20 countries
Small multiples expose the different scales and growth paths hidden by the world aggregate.