Society
The Dragon and the Elephant Dance for a Cleaner World
New reports from the IEA and Ember show that China and India are leading a global turning point — where renewables now outpace fossil fuels.
In late September, EdPublica reported an inspirational story from Perinjanam, a quiet coastal village in the South Indian state Kerala, where rooftops gleam with solar panels and homes have turned into micro power plants. It was a story of how ordinary citizens, through community effort and government support, took part in a just energy transition.
That local story, seemingly small, was in fact a mirror of a far bigger movement unfolding worldwide. Now, two major global reports–one from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and another from the independent think tank Ember–confirm that the world is entering a decisive new phase in its energy transformation. Together, their findings show that 2025 is shaping up to be the turning point year: the moment when renewables not only surpassed coal but began meeting all new global electricity demand. The year will likely be remembered as the moment when the global energy transition stopped being a promise and became a measurable reality — led by the two Asian giants, China and India.
The Global Picture: IEA’s Big Forecast
‘The IEA’s Renewables 2025’ report, released on October 7, paints an extraordinary picture of growth and possibility. Despite global headwinds — including high interest rates, supply chain bottlenecks, and policy shifts — renewable energy capacity is projected to more than double by 2030, adding 4,600 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable power.
To grasp that number: it’s equivalent to building the entire current electricity generation capacity of China, the European Union, and Japan combined.
At the centre of this boom is solar photovoltaic (PV) technology, which will account for around 80% of the total growth. The IEA calls solar “the backbone of the energy transition,” driven by falling costs, faster permitting processes, and widespread adoption across emerging economies. Wind, hydropower, bioenergy, and geothermal follow closely behind, expanding capacity even as global systems adapt to higher shares of variable power.
“The growth in global renewable capacity in the coming years will be dominated by solar PV – but with wind, hydropower, bioenergy and geothermal all contributing, too,” said Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA. “As renewables’ role in electricity systems rises in many countries, policymakers need to play close attention to supply chain security and grid integration challenges.”
The IEA forecasts particularly rapid progress in emerging markets. India is set to become the second-largest renewables growth market in the world, after China, reaching its ambitious 2030 targets comfortably. The report highlights new policy instruments — such as auction programs and rooftop solar incentives — that are spurring confidence across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
In India, the expansion of corporate power purchase agreements, utility contracts, and merchant renewable plants is also driving a quiet revolution, accounting for nearly 30% of global renewable capacity expansion to 2030.
At the same time, challenges remain. The IEA points to a worrying concentration of solar PV manufacturing in China, where over 90% of supply chain capacity for key components like polysilicon and rare earth materials is expected to remain by 2030.
Grid integration is another bottleneck. As solar and wind grow, many countries are already facing curtailments — when renewable power cannot be fed into the grid due to overload or mismatch in demand. The IEA stresses the need for urgent investment in transmission infrastructure, storage technologies, and flexible generation to prevent this momentum from being wasted.
Evidence on the Ground
If the IEA’s report is a map of where we’re going, Ember’s Mid-Year Global Electricity Review 2025 shows where we are right now — and the signs are unmistakable.
Ember’s data, covering the first half of 2025, reveals that solar and wind met all of the world’s rising electricity demand — and even caused a slight decline in fossil fuel generation. It’s a first in recorded history.
“We are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” said Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, Senior Electricity Analyst at Ember. “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.”
Global electricity demand rose by 2.6% in early 2025, adding about 369 terawatt-hours (TWh) compared with the same period last year. Solar alone met 83% of that rise, thanks to record generation growth of 306 TWh, a year-on-year increase of 31%. Wind contributed another 97 TWh, leading to a net decline in both coal and gas generation.
Coal generation fell 0.6% (-31 TWh) and gas 0.2% (-6 TWh), marking a combined fossil decline of 0.3% (-27 TWh). As a result, global power sector emissions fell by 0.2%, even as demand continued to grow.
Most significantly, for the first time ever, renewables generated more power than coal. Renewables supplied 5,072 TWh, overtaking coal’s 4,896 TWh — a symbolic but historic milestone.
“Solar and wind are no longer marginal technologies — they are driving the global power system forward,” said Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council. “The fact that renewables have overtaken coal for the first time marks a historic shift.”
China and India Lead the Way
The two reports together highlight that the epicenter of the clean energy shift is now in Asia.
According to Ember, China’s fossil generation fell by 2% (-58.7 TWh) in the first half of 2025, as clean power growth outpaced rising electricity demand. Solar generation jumped 43% (+168 TWh), and wind grew 16% (+79 TWh), together helping cut the country’s power sector emissions by 1.7% (-47 MtCO₂).
Meanwhile, India’s fossil fuel decline was even steeper in relative terms. Solar and wind generation grew at record pace — solar by 25% (+17 TWh) and wind by 29% (+11 TWh) — while electricity demand rose only 1.3%, far slower than in 2024. The result: coal use dropped 3.1% (-22 TWh) and gas by 34% (-7 TWh), leading to an estimated 3.6% fall in power sector emissions.
For both countries, these numbers align closely with the IEA’s projections. Together, China and India are now the primary engines of renewable capacity growth, demonstrating how large emerging economies can pivot toward clean energy while maintaining development momentum.
Setbacks Elsewhere
Yet progress is uneven. In the United States and European Union, fossil generation actually rose in early 2025.
In the U.S., a 3.6% rise in demand outpaced clean power additions, leading to a 17% increase in coal generation (+51 TWh), though gas use fell slightly. The EU also saw higher gas and coal use due to weaker wind and hydro output.
The IEA attributes part of this slowdown to policy uncertainty, especially in the U.S., where an early phase-out of federal tax incentives has reduced renewable growth expectations by almost 50% compared to last year’s forecast. Europe’s problem is different — a mature but strained grid facing seasonal fluctuations and low wind output.
These regional discrepancies underscore the IEA’s core message: achieving a clean power future isn’t just about building more solar farms, but about building smarter systems — integrated, flexible, and resilient.
Beyond Power
Both reports agree that while renewables are transforming electricity, their impact on transport and heating remains limited.
In transport, the IEA projects renewables’ share to rise modestly from 4% today to 6% in 2030, mostly through electric vehicles and biofuels. In heating, renewables are set to grow from 14% to 18% of global energy use over the same period.
These slower-moving sectors will define the next frontier of decarbonization — one where electrification, hydrogen, and new thermal storage technologies must play a greater role.
The Big Picture
Put together, the IEA’s forecasts and Ember’s real-world data signal that the clean energy transition has passed the point of no return.
Solar and wind are no longer simply catching up — they are now shaping global power dynamics. Their continued expansion is not only meeting new demand but beginning to displace fossil fuels outright.
“As costs of technologies continue to fall, now is the perfect moment to embrace the economic, social and health benefits that come with increased solar, wind and batteries,” said Ember’s Wiatros-Motyka.
Yet both agencies caution: to sustain this momentum, governments must expand grid capacity, diversify supply chains, and improve energy storage systems. Without these, the 2025 breakthrough could become a bottleneck.
A Symbol and a Signal
In a way, the world in 2025 looks a lot like Perinjanam did a few years ago — a place where optimism met obstacles, but the light won. What was once a village-scale transition is now a planetary transformation, proving that even small local models can foreshadow global change.
From Kerala’s rooftops to China’s vast solar parks, from India’s wind corridors to Africa’s mini-grids, the direction is unmistakable: the sun and wind are powering the next phase of human progress.
If 2024 was the year of warnings, 2025 is the year of evidence. The global energy system is finally tilting toward sustainability — not someday, but today.
Technology
From Tehran Rooftops To Orbit: How Elon Musk Is Reshaping Who Controls The Internet
How Starlink turned the sky into a battleground for digital power — and why one private network now challenges the sovereignty of states
On a rooftop in northern Tehran, long after midnight, a young engineering student adjusts a flat white dish toward the sky. The city around him is digitally dark—mobile data throttled, social media blocked, foreign websites unreachable. Yet inside his apartment, a laptop screen glows with Telegram messages, BBC livestreams, and uncensored access to the outside world.
Scenes like this have appeared repeatedly in footage from Iran’s unrest broadcast by international news channels.
But there’s a catch. The connection does not travel through Iranian cables or telecom towers. It comes from space.
Above him, hundreds of kilometres overhead, a small cluster of satellites belonging to Elon Musk’s Starlink network relays his data through the vacuum of orbit, bypassing the state entirely.
For governments built on control of information, this is no longer a technical inconvenience. It is a political nightmare. The image is quietly extraordinary. Not because of the technology — that story is already familiar — but because of what it represents: a private satellite network, owned by a US billionaire, now functioning as a parallel communications system inside a sovereign state that has deliberately tried to shut its citizens offline.
The Rise of an Unstoppable Network
Starlink, operated by Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX, has quietly become the most ambitious communications infrastructure ever built by a private individual.
As of late 2025, more than 9,000 Starlink satellites orbit Earth in low Earth orbit (LEO) (SpaceX / industry trackers, 2025). According to a report in Business Insider, the network serves over 9 million active users globally, and Starlink now operates in more than 155 countries and territories (Starlink coverage data, 2025).
It is the largest satellite constellation in human history, dwarfing every government system combined.
This is not merely a technology story. It is a power story.
Unlike traditional internet infrastructure — fibre cables, mobile towers, undersea routes — Starlink’s backbone exists in space. It does not cross borders. It does not require landing rights in the conventional sense. And, increasingly, it does not ask permission.
Iran: When the Sky Replaced the State
During successive waves of anti-government protests in Iran, authorities imposed sweeping internet shutdowns: mobile networks crippled, platforms blocked, bandwidth throttled to near zero. These tactics, used repeatedly since 2019, were designed to isolate protesters from each other and from the outside world.
They did not fully anticipate space-based internet.
By late 2024 and 2025, Starlink terminals had begun appearing clandestinely across Iranian cities, smuggled through borders or carried in by diaspora networks. Possession is illegal. Penalties are severe. Yet the demand has grown.
Because the network operates without local infrastructure, users can communicate with foreign media, upload protest footage in real time, coordinate securely beyond state surveillance, and maintain access even during nationwide blackouts.
The numbers are necessarily imprecise, but multiple independent estimates provide a sense of scale. Analysts at BNE IntelliNews estimated over 30,000 active Starlink users inside Iran by 2025.
Iranian activist networks suggest the number of physical terminals may be between 50,000 and 100,000, many shared across neighbourhoods. Earlier acknowledgements from Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX had activated service coverage over Iran despite the lack of formal licensing.
This is what alarms governments most: the state no longer controls the kill switch.
Ukraine: When One Man Could Switch It Off
The power — and danger — of this new infrastructure became even clearer in Ukraine.
After Russia’s 2022 invasion, Starlink terminals were shipped in by the thousands to keep Ukrainian communications alive. Hospitals, emergency services, journalists, and frontline military units all relied on it. For a time, Starlink was celebrated as a technological shield for democracy.
Then came the uncomfortable reality.
Investigative reporting later revealed that Elon Musk personally intervened in decisions about where Starlink would and would not operate. In at least one documented case, coverage was restricted near Crimea, reportedly to prevent Ukrainian drone operations against Russian naval assets.
The implications were stark: A private individual, accountable to no electorate, had the power to influence the operational battlefield of a sovereign war. Governments noticed.
Digital Sovereignty in the Age of Orbit
For decades, states have understood sovereignty to include control of national telecom infrastructure, regulation of internet providers, the legal authority to impose shutdowns, the power to filter, censor, and surveil.
Starlink disrupts all of it.
Because, the satellites are in space, outside national jurisdiction. Access can be activated remotely by SpaceX, and the terminals can be smuggled like USB devices. Traffic can bypass domestic data laws entirely.
In effect, Starlink represents a parallel internet — one that states cannot fully regulate, inspect, or disable without extraordinary countermeasures such as satellite jamming or physical raids.
Authoritarian regimes view this as foreign interference. Democratic governments increasingly see it as a strategic vulnerability. Either way, the monopoly problem is the same: A single corporate network, controlled by one individual, increasingly functions as critical global infrastructure.
How the Technology Actually Works
The power of Starlink lies in its architecture. Traditional internet depends on fibre-optic cables across cities and oceans, local internet exchanges, mobile towers and ground stations, and centralised chokepoints.
Starlink bypasses most of this. Instead, it uses thousands of LEO satellites orbiting at ~550 km altitude, user terminals (“dishes”) that automatically track satellites overhead, inter-satellite laser links, allowing data to travel from satellite to satellite in space, and a limited number of ground gateways connecting the system to the wider internet.
This design creates resilience: No single tower to shut down, no local ISP to regulate, and no fibre line to cut.
For protesters, journalists, and dissidents, this is transformative. For governments, it is destabilising.
A Private Citizen vs the Rules of the Internet
The global internet was built around multistakeholder governance: National regulators, international bodies like the ITU, treaties governing spectrum use, and complex norms around cross-border infrastructure.
Starlink bypasses much of this through sheer technical dominance, and it has become a company that: owns the rockets, owns the satellites, owns the terminals, controls activation, controls pricing, controls coverage zones… effectively controls a layer of global communication.
This is why policymakers now speak openly of “digital sovereignty at risk”. It is no longer only China’s Great Firewall or Iran’s censorship model under scrutiny. It is the idea that global connectivity itself might be increasingly privatised, personalised, and politically unpredictable.
The Unanswered Question
Starlink undeniably delivers real benefits, it offers connectivity in disaster zones, internet access in rural Africa, emergency communications in war, educational access where infrastructure never existed.
But it also raises an uncomfortable, unresolved question: Should any individual — however visionary, however innovative — hold this much power over who gets access to the global flow of information?
Today, a protester in Tehran can speak to the world because Elon Musk chooses to allow it.
Tomorrow, that access could disappear just as easily — with a policy change, a commercial decision, or a geopolitical calculation.The sky has become infrastructure. Infrastructure has become power. And power, increasingly, belongs not to states — but to a handful of corporations.
There is another layer to this power calculus — and it is economic. While Starlink has been quietly enabled over countries such as Iran without formal approval, China remains a conspicuous exception. The reason is less technical than commercial. Elon Musk’s wider business empire, particularly Tesla, is deeply entangled with China’s economy. Shanghai hosts Tesla’s largest manufacturing facility in the world, responsible for more than half of the company’s global vehicle output, and Chinese consumers form one of Tesla’s most critical markets.
Chinese authorities, in turn, have made clear their hostility to uncontrolled foreign satellite internet, viewing it as a threat to state censorship and information control. Beijing has banned Starlink terminals, restricted their military use, and invested heavily in its own rival satellite constellation. For Musk, activating Starlink over China would almost certainly provoke regulatory retaliation that could jeopardise Tesla’s operations, supply chains, and market access. The result is an uncomfortable contradiction: the same technology framed as a tool of freedom in Iran or Ukraine is conspicuously absent over China — a reminder that even a supposedly borderless internet still bends to the gravitational pull of corporate interests and geopolitical power.
Climate
Ancient lake sediments suggest India’s monsoon was far stronger during medieval warm period
New palaeoclimate evidence from central India suggests that the Indian Summer Monsoon was significantly stronger during the medieval warm period than previously believed
India’s monsoon history may be more intense than previously assumed, according to new palaeoclimate evidence recovered from lake sediments in central India. Scientists analysing microscopic pollen preserved in Raja Rani Lake, in present-day Korba district of Chhattisgarh, have found signs of unusually strong and sustained Indian Summer Monsoon rainfall between about 1,060 and 1,725 CE.
The findings come from researchers at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology, and are based on a detailed reconstruction of vegetation and climate in India’s Core Monsoon Zone (CMZ)—the region that receives nearly 90 percent of the country’s annual rainfall from the Indian Summer Monsoon.
Reading climate history from pollen
Researchers extracted a 40-centimetre-long sediment core from Raja Rani Lake. These layers of mud record environmental changes spanning roughly the last 2,500 years. Embedded within them are fossil pollen grains released by plants that once grew around the lake.
By identifying and counting these grains—a method known as palynology—the team reconstructed past vegetation patterns and inferred climate conditions. Forest species that thrive in warm, humid environments point to periods of strong rainfall, while grasses and herbs are indicators of relatively drier phases.
According to the scientists, the pollen record from the medieval period shows a clear dominance of moist and dry tropical deciduous forest taxa. This points to a persistently warm and humid climate in central India, driven by a strong monsoon system, with no evidence of prolonged dry spells within the CMZ during that time.
Medieval Climate Anomaly linked to stronger monsoon
The period of intensified rainfall coincides with the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), a globally recognised warm phase dated to roughly 1,060–1,725 CE. The study suggests that the strengthened Indian Summer Monsoon during this interval was shaped by a combination of global and regional drivers.
In a media statement, the researchers noted that La Niña–like conditions—typically associated with stronger Indian monsoons—may have prevailed during the MCA. Other contributing factors likely included a northward shift of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, positive temperature anomalies, higher sunspot numbers and increased solar activity.
Why this matters today
The Core Monsoon Zone is particularly sensitive to fluctuations in the Indian Summer Monsoon, making it a key region for understanding long-term hydroclimatic variability during the Late Holocene (also known as the Meghalayan Age). Scientists say insights from this period are crucial for contextualising present-day monsoon behaviour under ongoing climate change.
The BSIP team said high-resolution palaeoclimate records such as these can strengthen climate models used to simulate future rainfall patterns. Beyond academic interest, the findings have implications for water management, agriculture and climate-resilient policy planning in monsoon-dependent regions.
By revealing that central India once experienced a more intense and sustained monsoon than previously recognised, the study adds a deeper historical perspective to debates on how the Indian monsoon may respond to current and future warming.
Society
Reliance to build India’s largest AI-ready data centre, positions Gujarat as global AI hub
As part of making Gujarat India’s artificial intelligence pioneer, in Jamnagar we are building India’s largest AI-ready data centre: Mukesh Ambani
Reliance Industries Limited, India’s largest business group, has announced plans to build the country’s largest artificial intelligence–ready data centre in Jamnagar, a coastal industrial city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, as part of a broader push to expand access to AI technologies at population scale.
The announcement was made by Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, during the Vibrant Gujarat Regional Conference for the Kutch and Saurashtra region, a government-led investment and development forum focused on regional economic growth.
Ambani said the Jamnagar facility is being developed with a single objective: “Affordable AI for every Indian.” He positioned the project as a foundational investment in India’s digital infrastructure, aimed at enabling large-scale adoption of artificial intelligence across sectors including industry, services, education and public administration.
“As part of making Gujarat India’s artificial intelligence pioneer, in Jamnagar we are building India’s largest AI-ready data centre,” Ambani said, adding that the facility is intended to support widespread access to AI tools for individuals, enterprises and institutions.
Reliance also announced that its digital arm, Jio, will launch a “people-first intelligence platform,” designed to deliver AI services in multiple languages and across consumer devices. According to Ambani, the platform is being built in India for both domestic and international users, with a focus on everyday productivity and digital inclusion.
The AI initiative forms part of Reliance’s broader commitment to invest approximately Rs 7 trillion (about USD 85 billion) in Gujarat over the next five years. The company said the investments are expected to generate large-scale employment while positioning the region as a hub for emerging technologies.
The Jamnagar AI data centre is being developed alongside what Reliance describes as the world’s largest integrated clean energy manufacturing ecosystem, encompassing solar power, battery storage, green hydrogen and advanced materials. Ambani said the city, historically known as a major hub for oil refining and petrochemicals, is being re-engineered as a centre for next-generation energy and digital technologies.
The announcements were made in the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, underscoring the alignment between public policy and private investment in India’s long-term technology and infrastructure strategy.
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