Is electrification happening fast enough?

Electrification is advancing rapidly by historical standards but remains far too slow for net zero objectives.

Author: Jan Rosenow, Professor of Energy and Climate Policy, Oxford University

14 June 2026

This week electrification made global headlines: The hosts of the next UN climate summit (COP31) said that the world should commit to a goal of meeting 35% of final energy demand with electricity by 2035, up from today’s 21%.

The reason why electrification has risen up the global energy agenda is that because electricity is less than a quarter of global final energy use a clean grid only matters a if transport, heating and industry increasingly draw their energy from it rather than rely on coal, oil and gas burned on site. I cover similar ground to what is in this week’s Bright Spots in a forthcoming Aurora energy podcast.

Of critical importance is this: Electrification is not just a fuel switch from molecules to electrons. In short, electrification is efficiency. This is because electric machines are far more efficient than the combustion they replace. An electric motor turns around 90% of its input into useful work against a combustion engine’s 25%, and a heat pump delivers three to five units of heat per unit of electricity. So every point of electrification shrinks the total amount of energy the system actually needs. I call this “Electrofficiency”.

This is the direct counterpart to the Primary Energy Fallacy: judging the transition against today's fossil throughput overstates the task by a wide margin, because more than two thirds of that energy is simply wasted as heat and this waste heat can be reduced dramatically in a highly electrified world running on clean electricity.

That is what makes the electricity share of final energy consumption, the share of the energy we use that arrives as electrons, one of the most important measures of how the transition is really going.

Electricity supplies about a fifth of global final energy consumption today (21% in 2024). The share has risen by roughly 0.3 percentage points/year since 2010. But a single global economy-wide number obscures the structure underneath. At an aggregate level the world moves far too slowly to meet climate commitments. But sectors and countries move at very different speeds.

Buildings and industry rise, transport stagnates

Let’s split final energy use into its three big sectors using IEA data.

• Buildings: In 1971 electricity met about 11% of the energy used in the world's homes, offices, shops and public buildings. Today it meets 36%.

• Industry is a bit of a surprise. The conventional wisdom is that industry is stuck, too hard to electrify. The global data says otherwise. Electricity's share of industrial energy has more than doubled, from 15% in 1971 to 30% today, and it has been rising fastest in the last decade. Electric alternatives exist and the potential for industrial electrification of energy use is much higher than people think, potentially as much as 90% or more in the long run as I wrote in a previous article.

• Transport is the outlier at 1%, essentially unchanged since 1990, because liquid fuels held an advantage that only collapsed once batteries became cheap more recently. This is likely to pick up speed now with electric car sales growing by 20% globally exceeding 20 million in 2025, meaning one-quarter of all new cars sold were electric last year. Around 70% all electric cars sold last year were battery electric vehicles rather than hybrids and their share is increasing year by year.

It is clear that the global average cannot accelerate on one sector alone. Further electrification has to come from all sectors at the same time.

Almost everyone is behind on 2035

On current policies the IEA projects it reaches just 25% by 2035 or 4 percentage points of additional electrification in a decade. The COP31 “35 by 35” target requires reaching 35% over the same period which is equivalent to an increase of around 1.3 percentage points/year or roughly three times the pace of the IEA’s Current Policies trajectory and four times the historical trend.

The COP31 target is very similar to the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenario which implies an electricity share of a third of final consumption by 2035 and 55% by 2050. Other 1.5 °C-aligned scenarios span a similar range at mid-century, from approximately 54% in IRENA's 1.5 °C pathway to as much as 70% in the Energy Transitions Commission's analysis. The three climate-aligned trajectories converge on roughly one-third around 2035 before diverging, which indicates broad agreement on the near-term pace of electrification and genuine uncertainty only about how far direct electrification extends into heavy industry, aviation and shipping by mid-century.

Where to countries sit in respect to the 2035 ambition level called for by the COP31 hosts? Line the major economies up and most have substantial room for improvement. Japan is closest at 30.6%, only 2.4 percentage points short. China is at 29.3%, and notably is closing its gap faster than anyone because its additions are concentrated in fast-moving end uses. The United States and the EU are stuck around 22%, some 11 percentage points away from the IEA 2035 milestone, held back by continuous use of gas in heating and a slow industrial transition. Brazil and India trail at 20.4% and 19.1%. Whilst the target is physically achievable, of the large economies only China is currently moving at the pace required to meet the 35% target.

An important caveat: Which metric to use to track progress on electrification and how define any milestones is not trivial as my long-standing collaborator Michael Liebreich discusses in his excellent essay published earlier this week. This is because of the Electrofficiency effect I mentioned above: electric technologies use less energy for the same amount of useful energy output and when they replace one percent of fossil fuels their share does not increase by one percent but in case of electric cars and heat pumps only by 0.25-0.3 percent. More in Michael’s essay.

A further complication is that rising electricity demand from new loads such as data centres help bring up the electrification rate without displacing fossil fuels in industry, buildings and transport. And energy efficiency improvements of electric appliances point in the other direction. In other words, choosing the right metric is messy but in my view having an aspirational global commitment for electrification is both directionally correct and helps concentrates minds.

The same three sectors but very different races at country level

Just as different countries the three end-use sectors - buildings, industry and transport - move at very different speeds too.

• Buildings had some success with electrifying, with dozens of countries climbing steadily and the front-runners well past 50%, because the enabling technologies are mature. It is Asia that has seen the highest increases since 2000 (Indonesia: +44 percentage points, China: +36 percentage points, Thailand: +31 percentage points) but the highest shares today can be found in countries such as Norway (80%), Singapore (92%) and Malta (85%). The most unexpected is perhaps Norway given the cold climate and heating needs. Much of Norway’s heating today is from heat pumps as I wrote in this piece.

• Industry has seen significant progress in a number of countries. China is up from 20% in 2000 at 35% today. Mexico increased the share of electricity in industry from 26% to 40%. Indonesia has seen one of the steepest increases from just 10% in 2000 to now 31%. One standout country is Iceland with 95% industrial energy coming from electricity. But Iceland does not have an industrial sector representative of global industry.

• Transport has not made much progress in most countries at all except for a handful such as Singapore now at 13% electrification, and Norway at 7%, Sweden at 6% and China at 5%. But as I said earlier in this piece, this is likely going to change at a much faster rate going forward.

Richer doesn’t always mean more electrified

One potential explanation for different electrification rates could be that richer countries use more electricity compared to other energy carriers. But this is not an explanation that holds. Norway leads near 50%, but the United States and Germany are around 22%, below China and only modestly above India, while Indonesia at 27% outperforms economies many times richer. The correlation with GDP is weak and wealth clearly is not a binding constraint.

Much of it is national context, climate, industrial structure, economics and policy. What moves a country up the y-axis is the structure of its power sector, the carbon and energy prices facing industry, building codes that mandate electric heat, and the speed of EV adoption, none of which are determined by income alone. Norway is electrified because of decades of cheap hydro and deliberate transport policy, not simply because it is rich (although it clearly helped). Wealth buys more options to electrify but policy has a major impact on whether a country does it and at what speed. That is encouraging, because policy is the one variable governments can change relatively quickly.

The Global South is moving fastest

Much of the electrification debate focuses on the Global North. But rank countries by how much their electricity share has grown since 2000 and the largest gains are not in the Global North. China leads with a rise of nearly 20 percent since 2000. Indonesia, India, Morocco, Egypt and Thailand have all added substantially too. An important distinction: These are systems electrifying as they get built rather than retrofitting. In Global North countries it is the opposite.

Most of the century’s growth in energy demand will come from outside the OECD, which means the marginal unit of new energy infrastructure is being decided now, in exactly these countries. If it is built electric, the world avoids locking in decades of fossil fuel infrastructure and the long replacement cycles that come with it. If it is not, that capital is stranded later at far greater cost. China is the proof of concept: it electrified its end uses while adding clean generation faster than almost anyone had forecast (although not enough yet to replace significant amounts of coal generation but there are promising signs of peak emissions). It increasingly looks like the economic development pathway and the climate pathway are converging, which is perhaps the single most underrated trend in the transition.

How to accelerate

Most of the technologies required already exist today. A global electrification goal is laudable and has important symbolic meaning. But the key challenge is deployment at the scale and pace required. One of the main obstacles is the cost of electricity and in particular how it compares per unit of energy to the cost of fossil fuels. Some countries have already made reforms to bring about lower electricity prices but many have not. This week a forthcoming proposal from the European Commission leaked on how to reduce electricity prices in Europe. Many of the key ingredients in the draft are universally applicable: tax electricity less than fossil fuels, reform network regulation and tariffs to incentivise smarter use of the grid, and encourage the use of electricity when it is cheap and abundant. The next decade will show whether policy makers can move from aspiration to implementation.

As originally published by Jan Rosenow on Substack: Is electrification happening fast enough? - by Jan Rosenow