China is pulling ahead on electrification, while the US risks losing momentum, according to a report by the We Mean Business Coalition.
The Electrification Competitiveness Index assesses progress in 16 countries and groups them into four categories.
France and Spain join China in the ‘Solid foundation’ group as China has the highest deployment score and the other two rank well on grid performance and clean power shares.
Germany, India, Italy, Poland and the UK have been placed in ‘Potential for take-off’. The UK has the largest gap between policy and delivery and electricity costs about five times as much as gas per unit of energy in the country’s industry. Meanwhile, Germany faces a grid connection backlog of hundreds of gigawatts.
The US, Australia, Brazil, Ethiopia and South Korea are said to be at ‘Risk of stalling’. In the US federal policy reversals and grid bottlenecks risk slowing momentum.
Indonesia, the Philippines and South Africa are in the ‘Early-stage adoption’ category as clean power accounts for 18% of generation in Indonesia and South Africa and 23% in the Philippines.
These findings come after the COP31 President’s call for electricity to supply 35% of global final energy demand by 2035.
It also follows the first six months of the Hormuz crisis when fossil-fuel importing countries paid an extra $330 billion (£249 billion) for seaborne oil and LNG. According to the IEA, faster electrification could cut fossil import costs by around $400 billion (£302 billion) a year by 2035.
