Electrification offers an off-ramp from fossil fuels, but there is a hook

The Iran war is turbocharging electrification, but 'arteries of the clean energy age' are missing At what would be his last Climate Summit as UN secretary-general, António Guterres took to the stage with characteristic gravitas. "We are the first generation with the tools to end the fossil fuel age, and the last who can avert climate catastrophe," the 77-year-old told the audience in September. "Let us use them well." One tool, fast becoming the buzzword of global climate talks, is electrification. COP31 host Türkiye will push for a voluntary pledge at the November conference to meet 35 per cent of global energy demand with electricity by 2035, up from 23 per cent today. That would mean replacing fuels like gas and petrol with electricity across the transport sector and in homes, businesses and industry. "We now have a strong common understanding of the urgency of the climate crisis," COP31 president Murat Kurum told the United Nations General Assembly in September. "A significant part of the technologies we need is already available. The key question before us today is, how to put these solutions into practice, into real life?" The International Energy Agency (IEA) has done some of the work for them, with a dedicated report on electrification that reveals an energy revolution is already taking place. Solar PV and wind together are now the largest sources of growth in global electricity generation, overtaking coal and gas to meet over half of new electricity demand. Electric vehicle sales have increased 40-fold since 2015, and dramatically falling costs have driven new stationary battery storage additions, which made up almost 120 gigawatts (GW) in 2025, the equivalent of more than 100 coal-fired power stations. But if there was interest in electrification before, it has been turbocharged by another kind of crisis. "Perhaps the most prominent reason is that it's an energy security strategy," said Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford University. "Especially Europe, but also many of the Asian economies rely heavily on imports, and electrification allows them to use domestically generated electricity instead." The Iran war has left countries reeling from fuel shocks and volatility. A proposal to ban diesel exports in the United States is now prompting calls for rationing, as the war looks set to stretch on into next year. "The last serious energy crises were in the 1970s and only in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine," said Professor Rosenow. "We've really seen supply-side constraints when it comes to fossil fuels. "I think that really pushed electrification on top of the agenda," he said. Since March, about 25 countries have introduced structural policies to boost electrification. Indonesia is making gas-powered motorbikes electric, while policies in Ethiopia have grown its EV fleet to more than 15 times what it was three years ago. Australia is expanding a public EV kerbside charging program and has electrification incentives for both households and industry, while the Netherlands is replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. China, which accounted for over 60 per cent of the global increase in electricity demand from 2015 to 2025, is now electrifying heavy trucks and inland cargo ships. "So, we're seeing projects not just in Europe, in the US, in China, but we're also seeing them in places like Thailand, for example, or India," said Professor Rosenow, "so this is really something that is getting traction. "Even under Trump, in the US, heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces and continue to do so," he said. If disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz are adding to the momentum behind electrification, the IEA wants to run with it. Given 55 per cent of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions come from sectors that can be electrified, including residences, industry and transportation, it argues there are significant climate benefits of converting that energy to clean sources. The agency says electrification would cut the world's energy import bills by more than $US500 billion ($720 billion) every year, and because electricity is more efficient, switching to it as a supply source could roughly halve the global primary energy demand. "COP31 comes at a crucial time," the IEA's executive director Fatih Birol told the UN during Climate Week. "Because … the energy security objectives and the clean energy objectives are closely aligned. "I have never seen that they are so aligned in the past," said Mr Birol. Increased urgency as planet warms The promise of a solution couldn't come soon enough. August was the hottest month on record, and damage to human health, food security and water supplies is already evident. The UN has predicted the planet will exceed 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial warming within the decade, with temperatures rising to at least 1.8 degrees. Scientists have repeatedly warned that exceeding that threshold will lead to extreme weather, ecosystem loss, and submersion of small island states like Tuvalu. Cities, infrastructure and economies are all vulnerable to the effects of warming, with the potential for irreversible changes to ice sheets, ocean currents and the Amazon rainforest. Grid bottlenecks grow But if electrification promises a way to avert the climate crisis, there's a way to go before we get there. Despite a decline over the last decade, coal remains the largest source of electricity. And any efforts to replace it with low-emissions electricity sources run up against another problem: the grid. Wind and solar farms are being deployed faster than the infrastructure needed to connect and move that electricity, like high-voltage transmission lines. "The fact that we now have record growth in renewables and that we have record numbers when it comes to sales of EVs means that we have to build out the grid faster," said Professor Rosenow. The IEA estimates more than 80 million kilometres of grid infrastructure, roughly equivalent to the entire global grid, will need to be added or refurbished by 2040. "That's not an indicator that the transition is failing," said Professor Rosenow. "We can build a bigger grid. The question is, how fast can we do it?" The mismatch means more than 2,500 gigawatts of renewable energy projects, nearly twice the entire US's electricity generation capacity, are currently stalled in grid-connection queues worldwide. In response, the UN has launched a grid acceleration initiative to increase investment in electricity infrastructure and, in Mr Guterres' words, to help "build the arteries of the clean energy age". The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that investment in the grid will need to double, to about $US1 trillion a year, to meet that demand. "The crisis is accelerating, but so are the solutions," the secretary-general said during Climate Week. Türkiye won't meet its own target Beyond highlighting the grid's constraints, Mr Guterres also used his platform to call on "every country to develop a credible roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, with clear timelines". He said it was "defying science, economics and common sense" that fossil fuel expansion would continue. The US, no longer a party to the Paris Agreement that underpins COP31 negotiations, now leads the world in proposed gas-fired developments, much of which will be used to power data centres. But the secretary-general's message could also have been directed at the countries leading COP31. Data analysts from the global Climate Action Tracker group estimate Türkiye will fail to reach its electrification target by 2035, and analysts point out that the country's "renewable generation has largely supplemented, rather than displaced, fossil fuels". "Türkiye is also investing heavily in oil and fossil gas exploration," the Climate Action Tracker analysts found, "overtaking Germany in 2024 as the largest producer of coal-fired electricity in Europe." In Australia, which will lead negotiations for COP31, the Climate Council has counted 16 new or expanded coal mines approved since 2023. The NSW Independent Planning Commission has just approved the largest coal expansion in the state's history in the Hunter Valley, which will cause more than 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over the next two decades. As of 2026, nearly half of all electricity generation still comes from coal. A spokesman for the Commonwealth's climate change minister, Chris Bowen, did not respond directly to questions about whether the country was on track to meet its 2035 climate targets. Instead, they pointed to publicly available electrification incentives. Professor Rosenow said the drive for global electrification was still a cause for hope. "I would say it's a fork in the road for the energy discussion, where I think we're really talking about a fundamental reorganisation of the entire energy system here," he said. "If we stand any chance of really bending the emissions curve down, then I think it is electrification because of these vast efficiency gains, and because we figured out how to actually generate clean electricity now at a pretty low economic cost. "That is, to me, a reason why I'm quite hopeful," he said.