IRENA Says Grid Investment Must More Than Double to Hit 2035 Electrification Goal
Achieving 35% global electrification by 2035 requires 3.6 times more renewable capacity and a $1.2 trillion annual grid spend — Asia holds the deciding vote.
The global energy system was 21% electrified as of Tuesday (2026-06-23), IRENA reported — less than two-thirds of the 35% target it says the world needs to reach by 2035. Getting there would require moving at four times the current pace. Installed renewable capacity must rise from 5,149 gigawatts in 2025 to 18.4 terawatts by 2035, more than tripling the current base in a decade.6
Storage must keep pace. Grid-scale capacity needs to jump from 416 GW to 2,530 GW over the same period, IRENA found. Transmission investment running at around $500 billion a year must rise to $1.2 trillion annually and hold there through 2035.6
No region carries more weight in that calculation than Asia. The continent already generates over half the world's electricity and has accounted for three-quarters of global electricity demand growth since 2000, according to Ember data cited in the analysis published on Tuesday (2026-06-23). Asia overtook the West in electrification some years ago. Whether the global target is met or missed will be settled largely by decisions made in Beijing, Tokyo, and Jakarta.6
The difficulty is that Asia's renewable build-out and its continued reliance on fossil fuels are running in parallel, not in sequence. China's mostly coal-powered thermal generation rose 1.5% in 2024 to 6.34 trillion kilowatt-hours, official data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed on Friday (2026-05-15), even as wind and solar additions set records. China still draws roughly 60% of its electricity from coal.1,3
Xi Jinping committed at the United Nations to expanding China's wind and solar capacity to 3,600 GW by 2035, up from around 1,700 GW when the pledge was made. China has beaten earlier clean-power milestones ahead of schedule — it surpassed its 20% green energy target this year — and Greenpeace analysts argued that renewable power could meet all of China's new demand growth in 2025.2,1
Even so, analysts close to the Chinese government have suggested that Beijing's 2035 climate targets may disappoint, implying emissions reductions of roughly 10% over the following decade. That gap — between the trajectory implied by IRENA's 35-by-2035 benchmark and the political signals coming out of Beijing — reflects the pull of an industrial economy built around cheap coal, one that cannot be decarbonised at the pace IRENA envisions without sustained policy pressure.3
The investment shortfall is not unique to China. The IEA estimates that grid spending globally needs to increase roughly 50% from the current $400 billion annual run rate to absorb demand growth through 2030. AI infrastructure and data centres alone could account for 4% of global electricity use by the end of the decade. Renewable energy investment is on track to reach $2.2 trillion this year — more than double the capital flowing into fossil fuels — but the transmission and storage infrastructure to carry that generation is lagging behind.5,4
IRENA offered a partial concession to realism: rather than holding every country to a single 35% electrification bar, the agency argued for individually tailored transition pathways aligned with the global ambition. Some countries already clear the threshold — Iceland at 51%, Norway at 47%, Bahrain at 41%, Malta at 40%. Many emerging economies will not reach it until well after 2035.6
Ember adds a technology argument for optimism. Over 70% of the energy system can now be electrified using commercially available technologies, a share that was not achievable five years ago. That changes the capital deployment question. It does not change the political one.6
For commodity markets, the pathway IRENA describes is bullish for copper, lithium, and grid equipment. For thermal coal, the read is more ambiguous. Newcastle physical coal traded at $125.90 on Wednesday (2026-06-24). A credible acceleration in Asian grid electrification would compress coal's long-run baseload role — but China's 2024 thermal generation data suggests that compression remains years away rather than imminent.
The clearest next signal will be China's own 2035 climate pledge, expected at COP30 in Belem in November. If Beijing's target implies emissions reductions materially below the IRENA trajectory, the divergence between the 35-by-2035 ambition and the underlying coal build will become difficult to reconcile.3,2