Keeping cool in a warming world, EVs and data centres with AI drove electricity usage jump last year, the International Energy Agency finds

The autonomous International Energy Agency (IEA) has released the Global Energy Review for 2024, with the report data pointing to electricity consumption jumping by 4.3%, or 1100 terawatt hours.

This, the IEA says, is nearly double the annual average over the past decade.

The IEA report paints a mixed picture of global energy usage, as the shift to electricity as a power source gathers pace, but also notes environmental degradation causing the world to heat up.

Some of the increased energy hunger is due to transport becoming powered by electricity, and the boom in data centres and artificial intelligence.

However, keeping cool in record global temperatures is also driving electricity usage, the IEA noted. 

That led to global demand for coal rising by 1% last year, as intense heatwaves struck India and China, pushing up the giant nations' cooling needs.

As you'd expect, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose due to the record global temperatures. IEA found they were up by 0.8% in 2024, to 37.8 billion tonnes.

Emissions appear to be decoupling from economic growth however. In advanced economies, they actually fell by 1.1% to 10.9 blllion tonnes last year, which is the lowest in 50 years. This despite the cumulative gross domestic product of the advanced nations now being three times as large as then.

Growth for China's emissions has slowed, but per-capita they are now 16% above those of advanced economies, and nearly twice the global average. Developing nations showed the majority of emissions growth last year as well.

Nevertheless, 80% of the increase in global electricity generation last year was through renewables and nuclear. Added together, the two sources contributed some 40% of generation for the first time.

That, along with electric cars and heat pumps being deployed since 2019 put a dent into CO₂ emissions. Together, they prevented some 2.6 billion tonnes of the greenhouse gas emissions annually, or around 7% of the global total.

"The rapid deployment of five key clean energy technologies – solar PV, wind power, nuclear power, electric cars and heat pumps – from 2019 to 2024 avoided annual fossil fuel energy demand of more than 30 EJ. This is equivalent to 6% of total global fossil fuel demand in 2024, or more than the combined total energy demand of Japan and Korea last year," the IEA said.

Without the technologies the increase in global CO₂ emissions would have been three times larger, the IEA noted.

Likewise, while oil demand grew slightly by 0.8% in 2024, for energy, it fell below 30% for the first time ever. That's due to electric vehicles (EVs) now accounting for one in five cars sold globally, denting the use of oil for road transport.

In some markets such as New Zealand, Australia, China and the European Union, deployment of the technologies over the past six year has had a profound effect, preventing more than 10% of total energy-related emissions. 

Nevertheless, aviation and petrochemical industry use of oil rose in 2024, and natural gas demand was up 2.7%, or 115 billion cubic metres that year.

Overall, the world's appetite for energy rose at a faster than average pace last year, with demand rising for all sources. The one redeeming feature as IEA notes is that low-emissions sources including record solar generation that is meeting the demand.