Renewables, EV & Politics: A Race for a Clean Energy Future

It is another turbulent year for sustainability, with clean energy advancements clashing with political and corporate hesitations.

The sustainable investment firm Generation captures this in its 2025 Sustainability Trends Report.

The report details a landscape where climate technology is expanding rapidly, even as political will falters and corporate climate ambitions slow down.

Despite political headwinds, data shows clean technologies are scaling, investment is following and the costs of delaying the transition are rising.

Global energy leadership in flux

Global climate politics are in a “period of retrenchment”, exemplified by the Trump administration's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

This has weakened global commitments and, according to Generation, cancelled nearly US$30bn in prospective US clean-industry investment.

This has created a power vacuum that China is swiftly filling, positioning itself as the world's new sustainability leader.

China's transition is a result of aggressive industrial policy and booming exports of renewable technology and EVs.

The nation's emissions may now peak well ahead of its 2030 target.

As a key example, EVs now represent nearly 60% of new car sales in China, versus only 10% in the US.

Solar and storage growth

The report states that solar power and batteries are fundamentally reshaping the energy system.

However, this is not yet happening fast enough to cause a major downturn in emissions.

Last year, global solar generation grew by 28.3%, with China adding more capacity in a single month than any other country has in a year.

Batteries are also making an impact, meeting up to 20% of peak evening demand in California on some days.

The main challenge is rising demand.

The adoption of EVs, data centres and air conditioning is pushing power demand growth towards 4%, nearly double the long-term average.

This increase has allowed fossil-fuel generation to increase.

As a result, while coal's share in the energy mix is falling, the absolute volume being burned remains near record highs, caused by demand in China and India.

Investment trends

Electrification is now the primary goal for road transport, but other sectors face greater hurdles.

Heavy-duty transport decarbonisation is only just beginning, while aviation and shipping remain off course for net zero.

The report is also critical of the over-focus on hydrogen.

Generation believes the green hydrogen bubble has burst, with the authors stating the enthusiasm “may have cost us years” that could have been spent on more practical decarbonisation methods.

At the same time, benchmark data shows clean energy is attracting about twice as much global investment as fossil fuels.

The falling cost of solar, compared to static gas power costs, strengthens the case for this capital reallocation.

The core message for leaders is that the physics and economics of the transition are pulling in one direction while politics pushes in another.

Companies that view the current turbulence as a reason to pause their decarbonisation efforts risk being left behind.

They should instead re-evaluate policy risk and diversify their technology options in what the report calls “the race for the future”.

As an epigraph in the paper from William Shakespeare suggests, “And ’tis a kind of good deed to say well: And yet words are no deeds.”