Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy

The milestone

It has been reported that newly compiled figures from the International Energy Agency and the International Renewable Energy Agency show seven countries — Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — produced more than 99.7% of the electricity they consumed using renewable sources. Nearly 40 more countries generated at least half their power from renewables in 2021–2022, and Scotland even produced the equivalent of 113% of its electricity needs from renewables in 2022. Small places can be big proof points. Who knew the lights could run on waterfalls and windmills so well?

Why it matters

Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who published parts of the new dataset, said, “We don’t need miracle technologies.” He argues that electrifying everything and supplying that electricity with wind, water and solar (WWS) is the path forward. It’s a blunt, optimistic prescription: build the grids, scale the turbines and panels, and let the physics do the rest. For countries already at — or flirting with — 100% renewable power, this isn’t an abstract plan. It’s happening right now.

Solar’s moment

It has been reported that researchers at the University of Exeter and UCL argued in a 2023 Nature Communications paper that solar has passed an “irreversible tipping point” and could become the dominant global electricity source by mid-century as costs and efficiencies continue to improve. Advances such as perovskite materials and falling commercial costs feed that momentum. That’s the emotional core here — the sense that a technology can move from hopeful to inevitable. Feels a bit like watching a slow-motion encore turn into the headline act.

The road ahead

Of course, headlines don’t erase reality. Large emitters, aging grids, storage bottlenecks and political resistance remain. Can these island successes scale to the world’s biggest economies? Technically, many experts say yes; politically, that’s another story. Still, these figures are a milestone: not proof that the job is done, but evidence that the door to a renewables-first grid is open. Don’t throw out the fossil-fuel handbook yet — but maybe put a bookmark where the sun and wind chapters start.

Sources: the-independent.com, Hacker News