Solar PV

Solar is no longer one technology among several. It is the centre of gravity. The 510 gigawatts added in 2025 exceeded everything else combined by a wide margin, and the installed base has doubled in roughly two and a half years. China added 315 gigawatts on its own, followed by India at 37, the United States at 34, Germany at 15 and Brazil at 12. The driver is brutal economics: module prices collapsed under manufacturing oversupply, and at current prices the panel is often the cheapest line item in the project.

The constraint has moved accordingly. It is no longer the cost of the hardware, it is what the grid can absorb. Midday generation gluts, negative wholesale prices and rising curtailment are now the defining problems in every high-penetration market, which is precisely why storage is the fastest-growing technology on this page. The two markets are no longer separable: solar's success is storage's business case.

Onshore Wind

Wind overall had a record 2025, adding 158.7 gigawatts, and the overwhelming majority of that was onshore. China contributed 119 gigawatts, and a large part of that surge was a deadline effect: developers rushed to connect projects ahead of the shift from guaranteed pricing to the market-oriented mechanism announced by the NDRC and NEA in February 2025. Record years built on pulled-forward demand tend to be followed by softer ones, and 2026 installation data in China will show how much of the 2025 number was structural.

Outside China the picture is steadier and slower. India added 6.3 gigawatts, with the United States, Germany, Brazil, Türkiye and France the other significant markets. In mature European markets the binding constraint is not turbine supply or cost, it is permitting timelines and grid connection queues, and a growing share of activity is repowering, replacing twenty-year-old machines on existing consented sites with far larger modern turbines.

Offshore Wind

Offshore wind is 7 percent of global wind capacity and behaves like a different industry, with different engineering, different capital intensity, and different failure modes. 2025 was a maturation year rather than a breakthrough: 9.2 gigawatts connected, China consolidating its lead, large European projects commissioning on schedule, set against failed auctions in four European markets, the effective suspension of the US sector, and a full year without a single floating project reaching commercial operation.

GWEC forecasts 129 gigawatts of new offshore capacity between 2026 and 2030, with the UK taking the largest share of Europe's pipeline on the back of the record 8.4 gigawatts secured through CfD Allocation Round 7.

This is the summary. The full market analysis, regional breakdown, forecast and fault lines are on The Global Offshore Wind Market.

Battery Storage (BESS)

Battery storage is the fastest-growing power technology in the world, and 2025 was the year it crossed a symbolic line, overtaking pumped storage in installed power capacity. The 108 gigawatts added was 40 percent up on 2024, with China contributing around 63 gigawatts, the United States 19, and Europe 6.2. Around four fifths of new capacity was utility scale, and lithium iron phosphate now accounts for roughly 90 percent of deployments, cheaper and better suited to frequent cycling than the denser chemistries used in vehicles.

Two caveats keep the comparison with pumped storage honest. First, power and energy are different quantities: a gigawatt of BESS typically stores two to four hours of output, while a pumped storage plant may hold many more, so in energy terms pumped hydro remains far larger. Second, the market's structure shifted mid-year when China removed its broad mandate requiring new renewables to co-locate storage, moving the world's largest BESS market from policy-driven to market-driven deployment. Growth continued regardless, which is the more telling signal.

Pumped Storage Hydropower

Pumped storage is the oldest grid-scale storage technology and, by energy stored, still comfortably the largest. 2025 was its strongest year on record: 11.6 gigawatts commissioned, the global fleet past 200 gigawatts, and a construction pipeline, 243 gigawatts, that exceeds the entire existing fleet. China dominates that pipeline with 218 gigawatts under construction, and the total development pipeline across all stages stands at 621 gigawatts.

The technology's constraint has never been physics, it is time and money. A pumped storage scheme takes the better part of a decade to permit and build, requires specific geography, and needs revenue certainty over decades to finance, which is why policy frameworks for long-duration storage, such as the UK's cap and floor scheme, matter more to this sector than to any other on this page. Its role is also distinct from batteries rather than competitive with them: BESS shifts hours, pumped storage shifts days, and a grid dominated by variable renewables will need both.

Wave & TidalEmerging

The honest number first: marine energy is 0.5 gigawatts globally, one hundredth of one percent of the renewable fleet, and most of that is two tidal range barrages, La Rance in France, 240 megawatts, commissioned in 1966, and Sihwa in South Korea, 254 megawatts, commissioned in 2011. Everything else, tidal stream arrays and wave energy converters combined, amounts to tens of megawatts. That is why this section carries an Emerging label rather than equal billing.

Within that small number, the interesting part is tidal stream, where the UK leads. The MeyGen array in the Pentland Firth is the largest tidal stream project in the world, and successive UK CfD allocation rounds have included a ringfenced budget for tidal stream, giving the sector a route to revenue that wave energy does not yet have. The physics case is real, tidal flows are predictable years in advance in a way wind and sun are not, and predictable generation has genuine system value. The engineering case, surviving decades in fast-moving seawater at a cost anyone will pay, is still being made. This page will report progress when there is progress to report.

What to watch

Five things that will move these numbers between now and the next annual data release.

• China's pricing reform aftermath. The 2025 wind and solar surge was partly a rush ahead of the shift to market-oriented pricing. 2026 installation data will separate structural demand from deadline effect, in the market that accounts for nearly two thirds of everything built.
• Curtailment as the binding constraint. In every high-penetration market the limit is no longer build cost but grid absorption. Watch curtailment rates, negative price hours and connection queue reform, they now set the pace more than auctions do.
• Storage duration. BESS durations are lengthening from two hours towards four and beyond, pushing batteries into territory once reserved for pumped hydro. Where the economic crossover between the two settles will shape both pipelines.
• The tripling gap. COP28 set a goal of 11.17 terawatts of renewables by 2030. Even after a record year the world stands at 5.15, and the 6 terawatt gap implies annual builds far beyond 2025's record. The gap between rhetoric and arithmetic is the single most important number in this industry.
• The coal counterweight. Non-renewable additions nearly doubled in 2025, led by over 100 gigawatts in China, roughly 81 percent coal. Renewables are winning the share of new build, 85.6 percent, but the denominator is growing too.