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Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency for Business The business value of energy efficiency
Energy efficiency is often described as the “first fuel” because the cheapest and most secure energy is the energy that is not used. For businesses, this begins with a straightforward benefit: lower energy bills. In many cases, efficiency investments can pay back quickly through reduced energy costs alone, improving margins and reducing exposure to price volatility.However, the value of energy efficiency extends beyond energy savings. By improving how equipment, buildings and processes operate, efficiency measures deliver wide-ranging benefits that strengthen business competitiveness across several dimensions: Operational benefits Efficient and electrified equipment operates more reliably and with less stress…
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Universal Access to Clean Cooking in Africa Implications and policy considerations
A new recipe for success? Progress on clean cooking requires efforts from a wide range of stakeholders. These include efforts to enhance countries’ policy frameworks, address consumer affordability and other barriers to adoption, cultivate a skilled workforce and mobilise additional financing to the sector – themes discussed in this chapter.Access to low-cost debt will be key for companies to grow their customer base quickly. In the ACCESS, the share of debt financing in the sector increases from 35% today to over 50%. This depends on more financiers being able to assess and appropriately price risk clean cooking companies and…
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Global Methane Tracker 2026 Recent insights from methane emissions studies
Advances in measurement and data processing Methane detection has improved markedly in recent years by making better use of existing satellite arrays and launching new devices, improving airborne instrumentation and calibration, and deploying tower, stationary and handheld detectors more widely. Overall, detection limits have been optimised, coverage has broadened and observation times have increased. Meanwhile, advances in data processing have enhanced both the speed and the quality of analysis.These advances yield better coverage and sharper insights into the sources and scale of methane emissions. They also confirm that effective methane management requires multi-scale measurement frameworks that combine space…
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Global Energy Review 2026 Technology: Battery storage
…China continued to lead battery deployment in 2025, accounting for around 60% of global additions, followed by the United States and Europe. However, deployment is widening beyond the largest markets, with strong momentum in Australia and parts of the Middle East, where storage is increasingly seen as a key building block for electricity security and renewables integration.Battery-based uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) – primarily in data centres – also saw significant growth, with capacity additions rising 30% to 45 GW in 2025. However, unlike battery storage systems, UPS generally only provide short‑duration backup to bridge outages until other backup sources start.
- Key findings
- Global trends
- Oil
- Natural gas
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+ 9 pages
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Jennifer Morgan
State Secretary and Special Envoy for International Climate Action, Germany.
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Scaling Up Transition Finance Financial institutions and transition finance
…enabling mechanisms that support credible action even without full planning capacity.The role of transition finance could be reaffirmed to enable progress where decarbonisation is most difficult and urgent, engaging with real-world constraints rather than avoiding them. This implies the possibility of moving away from viewing transition finance as a “second tier” of green finance and positioning it as an equal “second pillar” of global financing for emissions reductions. Public and private actors could design supportive frameworks to scale transition investments, including the safeguards that can ensure that they make a lasting contribution to strengthen energy security and deliv...
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Electricity Mid-Year Update 2025 Emissions: Power generation CO2 emissions are plateauing
Global emissions from electricity generation rose by 1.2% in 2024, following an increase of 1.6% in 2023. Last year was even hotter than in 2023 – making it the warmest year on record – with the heat waves boosting electricity demand for cooling. Nonetheless, growth in power sector emissions showed signs of slowing down as rapid deployment of renewables constrained increases in fossil-fired generation. As this trend continues, we expect 2025 emissions to plateau and remain relatively unchanged. In 2026, we forecast a slight decline of less than 1%, as the increase in low-emissions generation depresses fossil-fired…
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Financing Electricity Access in Africa Beyond new connections
Providing an affordable, equitable and quality service Affordability constraints can prevent households from gaining access to electricity or from taking advantage of electricity services once a connection is made. An estimated 220 million people in sub-Saharan Africa (around 40% of those without access) would find the basic bundle unaffordable, rising to 400 million for the essential bundle (65% of those without access). Filling this affordability gap would cost an additional USD 2-10 billion per year, via supply-side subsidies to reduce developer costs, demand-side subsidies to reduce consumer costs, or reductions in financing costs.The cost of capital for electricity access projects…
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What Next for the Global Car Industry The importance of the growth in EV sales for the car industry
Highlights In 2024, more than one-fifth of all cars sold globally were electric. Policies remain key to growth in many regions, although falling prices make affordability an increasingly important driver. In China, two-thirds of battery electric cars sold in 2024 were cheaper than internal combustion engine (ICE) equivalents. In other major markets like Europe and North America, electric cars remain more expensive on average. But prices have been falling in many emerging economies on the back of affordable Chinese imports; in Southeast Asia, this helped push the share of electric car sales to 9% in 2024, almost double…
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Electricity Mid-Year Update 2025 Executive summary
Global electricity demand on course to expand robustly in 2025 and 2026 despite economic headwinds Global power demand is expected to rise much faster over the forecast 2025‑2026 period than it did during the past decade. While slower than the 4.4% surge in 2024, growth forecasts of 3.3% for 2025 and 3.7% for 2026 remain among the highest rates observed in the past decade and well above the 2015-2023 average of 2.6%. Despite a slowdown in economic activity, which has weighed on global electricity use so far in 2025, heatwaves continue to add to demand…