Australia is one of the sunniest places on Earth, and over the past decade it has become one of the world’s fastest adopters of solar power. Yet the same grid is still built on coal, and Australians remain among the highest emitters of carbon dioxide per person on the planet. Both things are true at once. These five charts follow that tension: how Australia’s electricity mix has changed, how it compares with the rest of the world, and why the transition is only half finished.

83% → 43%Coal’s share of Australian electricity, 2000 → 2025
19.6%Electricity from solar in 2025 (world: 8.7%)
14.5 tCO₂ per Australian in 2024 (world: 4.7 t)

1Coal’s grip on the grid has halved

In 2000, coal generated 83% of Australia’s electricity. By 2025 that had fallen to 43%. The gap was filled almost entirely by wind and solar, which grew from 0.1% of generation to 33%, while total demand kept rising.

Try it: switch between share and terawatt-hours with the buttons. Hover over any year to see the full mix, and click a source in the legend to hide or show it.

Chart 1. Australia’s electricity generation by source, 2000–2025. “Bioenergy & other” combines bioenergy with other minor renewables. Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2025), via Our World in Data (Ritchie et al., 2023b). Hazelwood closure: ENGIE (2016).

2Australia has become a solar standout

A decade ago, solar was a rounding error on Australia’s grid. In 2025 it supplied 19.6% of the country’s electricity: about 2.2 times the world average of 8.7%, and the highest share of any of the 17 G20 countries with 2025 data. Of all the countries in this chart, only Chile, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands get more of their power from the sun.

Try it: pick any country from the Compare with menu to highlight it against Australia and the world average. Hover over any grey line to see which country it is, and drag across the chart to zoom into a period (double-click to reset).

Chart 2. Solar’s share of electricity generation, 2000–2025, for G20 countries and selected solar leaders (Chile, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain). Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2025), via Our World in Data (Ritchie et al., 2023b).

3More sun and wind, but still a high-carbon grid

Adding renewables is only half of decarbonising a grid; the other half is what they replace. Each bubble is a country’s electricity system. Moving right means more wind and solar; moving down means less carbon per unit of electricity. In 2025, wind and solar made up 33% of Australia’s generation, a similar share to European countries such as the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain (36%, 25% and 42%). Yet each kilowatt-hour in Australia still produced about 525 g of CO₂e, compared with 154–285 g in those countries, because most of the rest of Australia’s power still comes from coal (darker bubbles).

Try it: press Play to watch 2000–2025 unfold, or drag the year slider. Hover over any bubble for its full profile. Australia is outlined in vermilion; bubble size shows total electricity generation and colour shows coal’s share.

Chart 3. Wind and solar share vs carbon intensity of electricity, 2000–2025. Carbon intensity is life-cycle emissions per kWh generated. Countries shown: G20 members and selected leaders with data for every year (25 in total). Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2025), via Our World in Data (Ritchie et al., 2023b).

4Progress at an average pace, from a dirty starting line

Since 2010, Australia has cut the carbon intensity of its electricity by 32%. That’s real progress (the 13rd-largest cut of the 24 countries shown), but Denmark, the United Kingdom and Greece have more than halved theirs. And because Australia started from one of the dirtiest grids, it still ranks 20th of 24 on cleanliness, and remains above the world average (525 vs 458 gCO₂e/kWh).

Try it: use the buttons to rank countries by how clean their grid is today or by how much they have improved since 2010. Watch where Australia lands in each ranking. Hover for exact values.

Chart 4. Carbon intensity of electricity in 2010 (hollow dot) and 2025 (solid dot). The dashed line marks the 2025 world average. Source: Ember (2026), via Our World in Data (Ritchie et al., 2023b).

5The coal hangover: emissions per person are still among the world’s highest

Australia produces only about 1.0% of the world’s CO₂, so it can look like a small player. Per person, the picture flips. Australians emitted 14.5 tonnes each in 2024, about 3.1 times the global average and 2nd among G20 countries. Coal alone accounts for 5.3 t per Australian, which is more than the average person on Earth emits from all sources combined (4.7 t).

Try it: switch between per person and national total to see how the framing changes the story. Hover over a bar for the breakdown by fuel; click a fuel in the legend to isolate it.

Chart 5. Fossil CO₂ emissions by fuel for G20 countries, 2024. Emissions are counted where fuel is burned, so coal and gas that Australia exports are counted in other countries’ totals, and land-use change is excluded. Source: Global Carbon Project (2025), via Our World in Data (Ritchie et al., 2023a).

What it all means

Data and methods

Data. Two open datasets were loaded directly from Our World in Data’s public GitHub repositories at the time of knitting: the Energy dataset (Ritchie et al., 2023b), which compiles electricity data from Ember (2026) and the Energy Institute (2025), and the CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions dataset (Ritchie et al., 2023a), which compiles the Global Carbon Project’s (2025) Global Carbon Budget. All numbers quoted in the text are calculated from the data when the report is knitted, so they update automatically if the source data are revised.

Preprocessing (all in R, using dplyr and tidyr).

Design and accessibility. Australia is always shown in vermilion and context countries in grey, so the reader’s eye is drawn to the protagonist in every chart. Colours come from the colour-blind-safe Okabe–Ito palette (Okabe & Ito, 2008), and no chart relies on colour alone: Australia is also labelled directly and drawn with a heavier line or outline. Chart headings state the key finding and each chart has a written summary above it, so the story is available without the graphics. Axes start at zero wherever bars or areas encode magnitude. Interactive charts were built with plotly (Sievert, 2020).

References

Ember. (2026). Yearly electricity data [Data set]. https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/

Energy Institute. (2025). Statistical review of world energy 2025 [Data set]. https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review

ENGIE. (2016, November 3). Hazelwood power station in Australia to close at the end of March 2017 [Press release]. https://en.newsroom.engie.com/news/hazelwood-power-station-in-australia-to-close-at-the-end-of-march-2017-4148-314df.html

Global Carbon Project. (2025). Global carbon budget 2025 [Data set]. https://globalcarbonbudgetdata.org/

MacNamara, S. (2025, March 19). Yallourn Power Station closure date confirmed. Energy Magazine. https://www.energymagazine.com.au/yallourn-power-station-closure-date-confirmed/

Okabe, M., & Ito, K. (2008). Color universal design (CUD): How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to colorblind people. https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/

Ritchie, H., Rosado, P., & Roser, M. (2023a). CO₂ and greenhouse gas emissions [Data set]. Our World in Data. Retrieved October 28, 2026, from https://github.com/owid/co2-data

Ritchie, H., Rosado, P., & Roser, M. (2023b). Energy [Data set]. Our World in Data. Retrieved October 28, 2026, from https://github.com/owid/energy-data

Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com

Acknowledgements

Data compiled and openly published by Our World in Data, Ember, the Energy Institute and the Global Carbon Project. Built in R with readr, dplyr, tidyr and plotly, and published with R Markdown on RPubs. Claude (Anthropic, 2026), a generative AI tool, was used to help suggest chart designs