Australia and India are both building more renewable electricity, but their electricity systems are changing in quite different ways. I have a personal connection to both countries and I’m interested in the energy industry, so I wanted to see how their electricity generation changed between 2000 and 2025. The charts below look at the generation mix, coal, renewable growth and what kinds of renewables are being used. Together they show why you need to look at both how much electricity is generated and what share of the total it makes up to get the full picture of the energy transition.
The two countries started with quite different electricity mixes, and they ended up in different places by 2025. Have a look at the coal share in each country and how solar, wind and hydropower changed. Hover over a segment to see its share and TWh.
Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2026), via Our World in Data (2026).
Coal went in opposite directions in the two countries. The index sets each country’s 2000 level to 100, which makes it easier to compare the change even though the countries are different sizes. Hover over the lines to see the actual generation in TWh.
Note: Each country’s coal generation is indexed to its 2000 value (2000 = 100). Hover over the lines to see the index and actual generation in TWh.
Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2026), via Our World in Data (2026).
Renewable electricity grew in both countries, but India added a lot more in absolute terms. Both countries use the same TWh scale here, so the gap you see is a real difference in the amount generated and not just a difference in growth rate.
Note: Both countries use the same vertical axis, starting at zero. This makes absolute generation volumes comparable; Australia’s smaller values may appear less prominent because India’s generation is much larger.
Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2026), via Our World in Data (2026).
The total amount of renewables doesn’t tell the whole story, so this chart looks at what the renewables are made of. It shows how hydropower, wind, solar and bioenergy changed over time. Hover over an area to see its share and TWh.
Note: Each year is normalised to 100% of renewable electricity generation. The chart compares the composition of renewable generation, not its absolute volume; see Chart 3 for generation in TWh. “Other renewables” is excluded because the dataset has no values for it for either country, so the shares are based on hydropower, wind, solar and bioenergy only. Hover over an area to see the source, year and generation in TWh.
Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2026), via Our World in Data (2026).
This chart shows how much of each country’s total electricity generation came from renewables, making it easier to compare the transition relative to the size of each country’s electricity system. Click “TWh generated” to compare the actual amount of renewable electricity produced by Australia and India.
Source: Ember (2026) and Energy Institute (2026), via Our World in Data (2026).
Overall, Australia and India are following different paths in their electricity transitions. India added a lot more renewable electricity in absolute terms, but Australia’s renewable share grew faster in the later years. Looking at generation, mix and share together gives a clearer picture than any one of them alone.
I used the Our World in Data energy dataset, which uses electricity data from Ember and the Energy Institute. I accessed it on 27 October 2026. I only kept Australia and India, so the regional groups (like world and continents) were removed. I looked at 2000 to 2025 because Ember’s annual series starts in 2000, and this gave me the same time range for both countries.
I removed rows with no total electricity generation. Australia’s missing nuclear values were set to 0, because Australia doesn’t have any nuclear generation.
I used nine base sources (coal, gas, oil, nuclear, hydropower, wind, solar, bioenergy and other renewables) so that overlapping totals like “fossil fuels” or “renewables” weren’t counted twice. I checked their sum against total generation, and the biggest difference was 0%. The dataset has no values for other renewables for Australia or India in any of the 26 years from 2000 to 2025, so the charts show eight sources. The shares in Charts 1 and 5 were recalculated from the TWh values instead of being taken from the dataset, while Chart 3 uses the dataset’s renewable generation total.
Chart 2 indexes each country’s coal generation to its own 2000 value, set to 100. Chart 4 shows each source’s share of renewable generation only, not of total generation, so every year adds up to 100%.
I left “other renewables” out of all charts because the dataset has no values for it in any of the 26 years from 2000 to 2025 for either country. Since every value was missing, setting them to 0 does not change any of the shares. This means the Chart 4 shares only describe hydropower, wind, solar and bioenergy.
I acknowledge the use of Claude (Anthropic, https://claude.ai/) to help debug the R code for the charts (label placement, axis ranges and interactive layout), to review the charts and suggest fixes.
I checked all AI-generated output against the data and the charts. The story, the choice of charts and the final wording are my own.
Anthropic. (2026). Claude (Opus 5.5 version) [Large language model]. https://claude.ai/
Ember. (2026). Yearly electricity data [Data set]. https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/
Energy Institute. (2026). Statistical review of world energy 2026 [Data set]. https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
Our World in Data. (2026). Energy dataset [Data set]. GitHub. Retrieved October 27, 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
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