Ashes to Abundance: The Great Coal Collapse

This piece is a direct follow-up to my recent July post, Why China Will Abandon Coal Sooner Than You Think, and builds on it from a global perspective. Where that post zoomed in on China, this one zooms out—tracking the domino effect worldwide.

Back in May, I wrote Ashes of Empire, where I laid out the economic and geopolitical logic behind coal’s impending obsolescence. At the time, I gave it a decade. But with the release of China’s jaw-dropping projected 2025 energy mix, I’m revising that: coal’s final chapter may be half as long as I thought—at least in China.

🔆 A Solar Supernova

What we’re witnessing is nothing short of an energy supernova.

In 2024, China added 334 GW of solar—more than the United States has installed in its entire history, and nearly seven times what the U.S. added in the same year (~50 GW). That’s the equivalent of hundreds of millions of new panels transforming the world’s largest electricity system. Solar alone generated over 1,000 TWh, accounting for around 10–11% of China’s total power, up from just 3% in 2020. It’s the fastest, largest-scale energy transition in human history.

But this isn’t just China’s story.

Globally, 2024 shattered records, with an estimated 593 GW of new solar capacity installed—a 29% increase over 2023—alongside continued wind growth. Together, solar and wind supplied 14.9% of the world’s electricity, up from 13.4% the year before. Solar alone hit 6.9%, and is projected to reach 8% in 2025, while wind climbs to 9.6%, according to Ember’s Global Electricity Review.

And it’s not just the usual players.

In Pakistan, rooftop solar is spreading faster than the grid can adapt, driven by rolling blackouts and rising electricity prices. In Uruguay, over 15% of new car sales in mid-2024 were electric—powered largely by a grid that’s already 98% renewable, with wind and solar doing most of the work. Brazil is deploying record community solar and auctioned PV. Across Europe, floating solar arrays and agri-PV are transforming rural landscapes into dual-use power plants.

This is a global phase shift—but China remains the gravitational center, manufacturing nearly 80% of the world’s solar panels and deploying them at a scale no other nation can match. The economics are now irreversible: solar delivers power at near-zero marginal cost, and is already the cheapest electricity source in over 90% of global markets.

This isn’t an upgrade—it’s a civilizational pivot. What Moore’s Law did for computing, Wright’s Law is now doing for solar.

🏴‍☠️ Coal’s Steep Descent

In 2015, coal made up 39.9% of global electricity. By 2024, that dropped to 34.7%. And by 2025, Ember projects it will hit 34.2%, according to their latest Global Electricity Review 2025.
📉 That’s a 5.7% drop in just a decade—more than the previous 20 years combined.

Some charts are already calling it:

Coal is on its way to a quiet burial.

While the West progressed, China scaled faster. Reluctantly or not, coal is now in structural retreat—driven by the brutal economics of solar and wind, not just policy.

🇦🇺 Case Study: South Australia

Want to see the future? Look south.

In 2024, South Australia ran 72% of its grid on wind and solar. On multiple days, that hit 100% renewables—without sacrificing stability. Battery storage (2 GW and growing) smoothed out the curves.

This is no longer a fringe experiment—it’s a functioning system in a developed economy, powered by distributed renewables and batteries. A model that will scale globally as storage costs plunge and old grids adapt.

🌍 A Global Rebalancing

Across Europe, fossil fuel use is collapsing. Here’s what happened from 2004 to 2024:

🇩🇰 Denmark: 76% → 12%
🇵🇹 Portugal: 73% → 15%
🇳🇱 Netherlands: 91% → 46%
🇮🇪 Ireland: 95% → 55%
🇬🇷 Greece: 90% → 50%
🇫🇮 Finland: 44% → 5%

Clean power isn’t a future ideal—it’s the present trajectory.

🧠 The Big Picture

Coal’s demise isn’t just a climate win—it’s a civilizational pivot:

From extraction to generation
From fossil scarcity to solar abundance
From centralized grids to resilient, decentralized energy
From the industrial age to the Age of Intelligence and Energy

This is how we climb toward a Type I civilization (harnessing planetary energy).

🌌 Beyond Coal: Enter the Age of Superabundance

Coal’s collapse isn’t just the end of one era—it’s the ignition of another.

As solar, wind, and batteries scale exponentially, we’re not just replacing fossil fuels—we’re unlocking a new physics of energy. One where power is cheap, local, clean, and effectively infinite.

According to RethinkX, this is the threshold of superabundance—where energy’s near-zero marginal cost reshapes every sector: food, transport, industry, computation.

Entire cities powered for cents.
Desalination without guilt.
AI, robotics, and precision fermentation fueled by limitless electrons.

This is no utopia—it’s a convergence already underway, just unevenly distributed. The real question is no longer if, but how fast.

We are not just burying coal.

We are building the infrastructure of intelligence—the foundation for the next leap in human civilization.

🔚 Final Thought

We are living through an energy supernova—scaling solar and wind faster than fossil fuels can retreat. The shift is no longer theoretical. In 2024 alone, the world added over half a terawatt of new solar capacity. While coal’s global retreat won’t be perfectly smooth—dragged at times by political inertia, aging grids, or artificial subsidies—the trajectory is locked in.

We are witnessing the final economic cycle of coal.

China will get there first. Its scale, urgency, and manufacturing dominance have turned it into the gravitational center of the energy transition. But the ripple effects are global. From Uruguay’s 98% renewable grid, to Pakistan’s solar rooftops, to Australia’s sun-drenched fields lighting up with panels—this isn’t just a Chinese story anymore. It’s a planetary pivot.

💥 This isn’t a sunset—it’s a burial.
⚡ The future? It’s arriving at 100 solar panels per second.

And once critical mass is reached, the rest of the world won’t simply follow. It will ignite.

📚 References