# Where the US Ranks on Clean Energy American politicians like to describe the United States as either the world's clean-energy leader or a country being ruined by green mandates. The data supports neither story. On the share of electricity that comes from zero-carbon sources, the US sits **roughly in the middle of about 200 countries and territories**, and **second from the bottom in the [[G7]]**, ahead of only [[Japan]]. Its biggest change over the past decade was not a shift to clean power. It was a shift **from coal to natural gas**. The figures below come from **Systems Change Lab**, a joint project of the World Resources Institute and the Bezos Earth Fund (the climate philanthropy [[Jeff Bezos]] launched in 2020). It tracks hundreds of measures of the transition to a low-carbon economy, using electricity data from the energy think tank Ember and car-sales data from the [[International Energy Agency]]. The latest full year is 2024 for electricity and 2023 for country-level car sales. ## The scorecard | Measure | United States | World | US position | |---|---|---|---| | Electricity from zero-carbon sources (2024) | 42% | 41% | About 91st of 200; 6th of 7 in the G7 | | Electricity from coal (2024) | 15% | 34% | Less than half the world average; 3rd-highest in the G7 | | Electricity from natural gas (2024) | 43% | 22% | Nearly double the world average; 2nd-highest in the G7 | | Electric share of new car sales (2023) | 9.5% | 18% | 30th of 48 countries with data; 5th of 7 in the G7 | | Electricity from solar (2024) | 6.9% | 6.9% | Exactly the world average | | Electricity from wind (2024) | 10% | 8.1% | Above the world average; about a third of Germany's or the UK's share | "Zero-carbon sources" means solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal and bioenergy. ## The US next to its peers Sorted by clean electricity share. Coal, gas and clean shares are percentages of electricity generated in 2024; car sales are 2023. | Country | Clean electricity | Coal | Gas | Electric car sales | |---|---|---|---|---| | [[France]] | 94% | 0.3% | 3.4% | 25% | | [[Canada]] | 78% | 4.2% | 17% | 13% | | [[United Kingdom]] | 65% | 0.8% | 30% | 24% | | [[Germany]] | 58% | 22% | 16% | 24% | | [[Italy]] | 50% | 1.8% | 44% | 9.2% | | **United States** | **42%** | **15%** | **43%** | **9.5%** | | World | 41% | 34% | 22% | 18% | | [[China]] | 38% | 58% | 3.2% | 38% | | [[Japan]] | 31% | 32% | 34% | 3.6% | | [[India]] | 22% | 75% | 2.8% | 2.0% | The comparison with China cuts both ways. China burns far more coal (58% of its power), but it sells electric cars at four times the US rate, and its solar share (8.3%) has passed America's. ## Coal out, gas in Between 2019 and 2024, the US share of electricity from coal fell from 23% to 15%. That is real progress. But gas filled more of the gap than clean power did: gas rose from 38% to 43%, while zero-carbon sources rose from 38% to 42%. According to Systems Change Lab, the United States now produces **more than a quarter of all the gas-fired electricity in the world**, after two decades of steady growth driven by the shale-gas boom. Gas emits roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned, so the switch cut emissions. It also locks in new fossil-fuel plants and pipelines for decades, and leaks of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from gas production eat into the gains. Other rich countries took a different path. The UK cut gas from 41% to 30% of its electricity over the same five years while nearly eliminating coal. Germany cut coal from 29% to 22% while wind grew from 21% to 29%. Early figures for 2025 from the US Energy Information Administration show coal's share ticking back up, to about 17% of utility-scale generation, with gas at about 41%. (The EIA counts only large power plants, so its numbers differ slightly from the figures above, which include estimates of rooftop solar.) ## Where the US is doing well - **Coal is shrinking.** At 15%, the US relies on coal less than half as much as the world does, and far less than China (58%), India (75%) or Japan (32%). - **Solar is booming.** The solar share of US electricity more than doubled between 2019 and 2024, from 2.6% to 6.9%. - **Wind is above average.** At 10%, US wind power is ahead of the world (8.1%) and level with China (9.9%). ## Why it matters **The world is off track, and the US is not pulling ahead.** Systems Change Lab measures each country against what the [[Paris Agreement]] goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C would require. Globally, clean power needs to reach roughly 88–91% of electricity by 2030, coal needs to fall to about 4%, gas to 5–7%, and electric cars need to reach 75–95% of new sales. On every one of those measures, the world is rated off track or well off track, and the US is near or below the world average on most of them. **The numbers stop before the policy changes.** These figures end in 2024. In July 2025 the [[Big Beautiful Bill]] eliminated many of the [[Inflation Reduction Act]]'s clean-energy tax credits, the federal incentives for solar, wind, batteries and electric cars. The next few years of data will show what that did. The broader fight is mapped in [[Energy Transition Politics]] and [[Climate Policy Sabotage Arc]]. **Demand is rising again.** After years of flat US electricity use, demand is growing, driven partly by [[Data Centers]] for artificial intelligence. The World Resources Institute notes that many forecasts put US data-center electricity use at 300–400 terawatt-hours a year by 2030. When demand grows, clean power has to grow even faster just to hold its share, and new gas plants become the easy default. ## How to read these numbers - **Shares, not totals.** Each figure is a share of all electricity generated (or of all new cars sold). A country can add a lot of solar and still see its clean share stall if demand grows faster. - **Rankings include small places.** The global rankings cover about 200 countries and territories, including small islands that run entirely on imported fuel or hydropower. That is why this page also compares the US with the G7, China and India. - **Different years.** Electricity figures are for 2024. Country-level electric car figures are for 2023, the latest year with full country data. Globally, electric cars reached 22% of new car sales in 2024. ## Connections - [[Energy Transition Politics]] — the fight over the shift away from fossil fuels - [[Climate Policy Sabotage Arc]] — how climate policy has been slowed and rolled back - [[Fossil Fuel Industry and Climate]] — the industry on the other side of these numbers - [[Inflation Reduction Act]] — the 2022 law behind much of the recent clean-energy growth - [[Big Beautiful Bill]] — the 2025 law that cut many of its tax credits - [[Nuclear Energy Debate]] — the largest single source of zero-carbon power in the US - [[Data Centers]] — the new source of electricity demand - [[Climate Science]] — the science behind the targets ## Sources - Systems Change Lab, indicators for zero-carbon, coal and gas shares of electricity generation and electric shares of light-duty vehicle sales (data accessed October 2026): https://www.systemschangelab.org - Systems Change Lab, "The State of Climate Action in 2025: 10 Key Findings": https://systemschangelab.org/news/state-climate-action-2025-10-key-findings - Ember, Yearly Electricity Data (original source for the electricity figures): https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/ - International Energy Agency, Global EV Data Explorer (original source for the car-sales figures): https://www.iea.org/articles/global-ev-data-explorer - US Energy Information Administration, "Electricity in the United States": https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php - World Resources Institute, "Powering the US Data Center Boom" (September 2025): https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-centers-electricity-demand