At 12.33pm on Monday 28 April, most of Spain and Portugal were plunged into chaos by a blackout.
While the initial trigger remains uncertain, the nationwide blackouts took place after around 15 gigawatts (GW) of electricity generating capacity – equivalent to 60% of Spain’s power demand at the time – dropped off the system within the space of five seconds.
The blackouts left millions of people without power, with trains, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and internet access failing across the Iberian peninsula.
By Tuesday morning, almost all electricity supplies across Spain and Portugal had been restored, but questions about the root cause remained.
Many media outlets were quick to – despite very little available data or information – blame renewables, net-zero or the energy transition for the blackout, even if only by association, by highlighting the key role solar power plays in the region’s electricity mix.
Below, Carbon Brief examines what is known about the Spanish and Portuguese power cuts, the role of renewables and how the media has responded.
What happened and what was the impact?
The near-total power outage in the Iberian Peninsula on Monday affected millions of people.
Spain and Portugal experienced the most extensive blackouts, but Andorra also reported outages, as did the Basque region of France. According to Reuters, the blackout was the biggest in Europe’s history.
In a conference call with reporters, Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica set out the order of events.
Shortly after 12.30pm, the grid suffered an “event” akin to loss of power generation, according to a summary of the call posted by Bloomberg’s energy and commodities columnist Javier Blas on LinkedIn. While the grid almost immediately self-stabilised and recovered, about 1.5 seconds later a second “event” hit, he wrote.
Around 3.5 seconds later, the interconnector between the Spanish region of Catalonia and south-west France was disconnected due to grid instability. Immediately after this, there was a “massive” loss of power on the system, Blas said.
This caused the power grid to “cascade down into collapse”, causing the “unexplained disappearance” of 60% of Spain’s generation, according to Politico.
It quoted Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who told a press conference late on Monday that the causes were not yet known:
“This has never happened before. And what caused it is something that the experts have not yet established – but they will.”
The figure below shows the sudden loss of 15GW of generating capacity from the Spanish grid at 12.33pm on Monday. In addition, a further 5GW disconnected from the Portuguese grid.
The Guardian noted in its coverage that “while the system weathered the first event, it could not cope with the second”.
A separate piece from the publication added that “barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout”.
El País reported that “the power cut…paralysed the normal functioning of infrastructures, telecommunications, roads, train stations, airports, stores and buildings. Hospitals have not been impacted as they are using generators.”
According to Spanish newswire EFE, “hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets, forced to walk long distances home due to paralysed metro and commuter train services, without mobile apps as telecommunications networks also faltered”.
It added that between 30,000 and 35,000 passengers had to be evacuated from stranded trains.
The New York Times reported that Portuguese banks and schools closed, while ATMs stopped working across the country and Spain. People “crammed into stores to buy food and other essentials as clerks used pen and paper to record cash-only transactions”, it added.
Spain’s interior ministry declared a national emergency, according to Reuters, deploying 30,000 police to keep order.
Both Spain and Portugal convened emergency cabinet meetings, with Spain’s King Felipe VI chairing a national security council meeting on Tuesday to discuss an investigation into the power outage, Sky News reported.
By 10pm on Monday, 421 out of Spain’s 680 substations were back online, meaning that 43% of expected power demand was being met, reported the Guardian.
By Tuesday morning, more than 99% of the total electricity supply had been recovered, according to Politico, quoting Red Eléctrica.
In Portugal, power had been restored to every substation on the country’s grid by 11.30pm on Monday. In a statement released on Tuesday, Portuguese grid operator REN said the grid had been “fully stabilised”.
What caused the power cuts?
In the wake of the power cuts, politicians, industry professionals, media outlets, armchair experts and the wider public scrambled to make sense of what had just happened.
Spanish prime minister Sánchez said on the afternoon of the blackout that the government did not have “conclusive information” on its cause, adding that it “[did] not rule out any hypothesis”, Spanish newspaper Diario Sur reported.
Nevertheless, some early theories were quickly rejected by officials.
Red Eléctrica, “preliminarily ruled out that the blackout was due to a cyberattack, human error or a meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon”, El País reported the day after the event.
Politico noted that “people in the street in Spain and some local politicians” had speculated about a cyberattack.
However, it quoted Eduardo Prieto, Red Eléctrica’s head of system operation services, saying that while the conclusions were preliminary, the operator had “been able to conclude that there has not been any type of intrusion in the electrical network control systems that could have caused the incident”.
The Majorca Daily Bulletin reported that Spain’s High Court said it would open an investigation into whether the event was the result of a cyberattack.
Initial reporting by news agencies blamed the power cuts on a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”, citing the Portuguese grid operator REN, according to the Guardian. The newspaper added that REN later said this statement had been incorrectly attributed to it.
The phenomenon in question was described as an “induced atmospheric vibration”.
Prof Mehdi Seyedmahmoudian, an electrical engineer at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, explained in the Conversation that this was “not a commonly used term”.
Nevertheless, he said the phenomenon being described was familiar, referring to “wavelike movements” in the atmosphere caused by sudden changes in temperature or pressure.
In general terms, Reuters explained that power cuts are often linked to extreme weather, but that the “weather at the time of Monday’s collapse was fair”. It added that faults at power stations, power distribution lines or substations can also trigger outages.
Another theory was that a divergence of electrical frequency from 50 cycles per second (Hz), the European standard, could have caused parts of the system to shut down in order to protect equipment, France 24 explained.
Some analysts noted that “oscillations” in grid frequency shortly before the events in Spain and Portugal could be related to the power cuts. Tobias Burke, policy manager at Energy UK, explained this theory in his Substack:
“The fact these frequency oscillations mirrored those in Latvia…at the other extreme of the Europe-spanning ENTSO-E network, might suggest complex inter-area oscillations across markets could be the culprit.”
This phenomenon can be seen in a chart shared by Prof Lion Hirth, an energy researcher at Hertie School, on LinkedIn.
With many details still unknown, much of the media speculation has focused on the role that renewable energy could have played in the blackouts. (See: Did renewable energy play a role in the cut?)
Many of the experts cited in the media emphasised the complexity of determining the cause of the outages. Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute Europe, was quoted by the Associated Press stating:
“There’s a variety of things that usually happen at the same time and it’s very difficult for any event to say ‘this was the root cause’.”
Nevertheless, there are several efforts now underway to determine what the causes were.
Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, announced on Tuesday that the government would set up an independent technical commission to investigate the blackouts, while stressing that the problem had originated in Spain, according to Euractiv.
Finally, EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen has indicated that the EU will open a “thorough investigation” into the reasons behind the power cuts, BBC News noted.
Did renewable energy play a role in the blackouts?
As commentators began to look into the cause of the blackout, many pointed to the high share of renewables in Spain’s electricity mix.
On 16 April, Spain’s grid had run entirely on renewable sources for a full day for the first time ever, with wind accounting for 46% of total output, solar 27%, hydroelectric 23% and solar thermal and others meeting the rest, according to PV Magazine.
Spain is targeting 81% renewable power by 2030 and 100% by 2050.
At the time of the blackout on Monday, solar accounted for 59% of the country’s electricity supplies, wind nearly 12%, nuclear 11% and gas around 5%, reported the Independent.
The initial “event” is thought to have originated in the south-western region of Extremadura, noted Politico, “which is home to the country’s most powerful nuclear power plant, some of its largest hydroelectric dams and numerous solar farms.”
On Tuesday, Red Eléctrica’s head of system operation services Eduardo Prieta said that it was “very possible that the affected generation [in the initial ‘events’] could be solar”.
This sparked further speculation about how grids that are highly reliant on variable renewables can be managed so as to ensure security of supply.
Political groups such as the far-right VOX – which has historically pushed back against climate action such as the expansion of renewables – also pointed to the blackout as evidence of “the importance of a balanced energy mix”.
However, others rejected this suggestion, with EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen telling Bloomberg that the blackout could not be pinned on a “specific source of energy”:
“As far as we know, there was nothing unusual about the sources of energy supplying electricity to the system yesterday. So the causes of the blackout cannot be reduced to a specific source of energy, for instance renewables.”
Others have sought to highlight that, while it was possible solar power was involved in the initial frequency event, this does not mean that it was ultimately the cause of the blackout.
Writing on LinkedIn, chief technology officer of Arenko, a renewable energy software company, Roger Hollies, noted:
“The initial trip may well have been a solar plant, but trips happen all the time across all asset types. Networks should be designed to withstand multiple loss of generators. 15GW is not one power station, this is the equivalent of 10 large gas or nuclear power stations or 75 solar parks.”
Others pointed to what they said was insufficient nuclear power on the grid – a notion that prime minister Sánchez rejected, according to El País.
Speaking on Tuesday, he said that those arguing the blackouts showed a need for more nuclear power were “either lying or showing ignorance”, according to the newspaper. It said he highlighted that nuclear plants were yet to fully recover from the event.
One key aspect of the transition away from electricity systems built around thermal power stations burning coal, gas or uranium is a loss of “inertia”, the Financial Times highlighted.
Thermal power plants generate electricity using large spinning turbines, which rotate at the same 50 cycles per second (Hz) speed as the electrical grid oscillates. The weight of these “large lump[s] of spinning metal” gives them “inertia”, which counteracts changes in frequency on the rest of the grid.
When faults cause a rise or fall in grid frequency, this inertia helps lower the rate of change of frequency, giving system operators more time to respond, noted Adam Bell, director of policy at Stonehaven, in a post on LinkedIn.
Solar does not include a spinning generator, and therefore, critics pointed to the lack of inertia on the grid due to the high levels of the technology as a cause of the blackout.
As Bell pointed out, this ignores the inertia provided by nuclear, hydro and solar thermal on the grid at the time of the blackout, alongside the Spanish grid operator having built “synchronous condensers” to help boost inertia and grid stability.
Bell added:
“A lack of inertia was therefore not the main driver for the blackout. Indeed, post the frequency event, no fossil generation remained online – but wind, solar and hydro did.”
While the ultimate cause of the blackouts remains to be seen, they have highlighted the need for an increased focus on grid stability, particularly as the economy is electrified.
A selection of comments from experts published in Review Energy emphasises the need for further resilience to be built into the grid as it transitions away from fossil fuels.
How has the media responded to the power cut?
As the crisis was still unfolding and its cause remained unknown, several climate-sceptic right-leaning UK publications clamoured to draw a link between the blackouts and the nations’ reliance on renewable energy.
It comes as right-leaning titles have stepped up their campaigning against climate policy over the past year.
On Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph carried a frontpage story headlined: “Net-zero blamed for blackout chaos.”
But the article contradicted its own headline by concluding: “What exactly happened remains unclear for now. And the real answer is likely to involve several factors, not just one.”
None of the experts quoted in the piece blamed “net-zero” for the incident.
The Daily Telegraph also carried an editorial seeking to argue renewable energy was the cause of the blackouts, which claimed that “over-reliance on renewables means a less resilient grid”.
The Daily Express had an editorial (not online) claiming that the blackout shows “relying on renewables is dim”.
Additionally, the Standard carried a comment by notorious climate-sceptic commentator Ross Clark breathlessly blaming the blackout on “unreliable” renewables, with a fear-monguering warning that the “same could happen in the UK”.
The Daily Mail published a comment by Rupert Darwall, a climate-sceptic author who is part of the CO2 Coalition – an organisation seeking to promote “the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives” – which claimed that the blackout showed “energy security is being sacrificed at the altar of green dogma”.
Climate-sceptic libertarian publication Spiked had a piece by its deputy editor Fraser Myers titled: “Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by net-zero.” The article claimed that “our elites’ embrace of green ideology has divorced them from reality”.
In Spanish media, Jordi Sevilla, the former president of Red Eléctrica, wrote in the financial publication Cinco Días that, while it is not known what caused the blackout, it is clear that the country’s grid “requires investments to adapt to the technical reality of the new generation mix”. He continued:
“In Spain, in the last decade, there has been a revolution in electricity generation to the point that renewable technologies ([solar] photovoltaic and wind, above all) now occupy the majority of the energy mix. This has had very positive impacts on CO2 emissions, lower electricity prices and increased national autonomy.
“But there is a technical problem: photovoltaic and wind power are not synchronous energies, whereas our transmission and distribution networks are designed to operate only with a minimum voltage in the energy they transport. Therefore, to operate with current technology, the electrical system must maintain synchronous backup power, which can be hydroelectric, gas or nuclear, to be used when photovoltaic and wind power are insufficient, either due to their intermittent nature (there may be no sun or wind) or due to the lack of synchronisation required by the generators to operate.”
For Bloomberg, opinion columnist Javier Blas said that “Spain’s blackout shouldn’t trigger a retreat from renewables”, but shows that “an upgraded grid is urgently needed for the energy transition”. He added:
“The world didn’t walk away from fossil-fuel and nuclear power stations because New York suffered a massive blackout in 1977. And it shouldn’t walk away from solar and wind because Spain and Portugal lost power for a few hours.
“But we should learn that grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources.”
The post Q&A: What we do – and do not – know about the blackout in Spain and Portugal appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What we do – and do not – know about the blackout in Spain and Portugal
Greenhouse Gases
Ricky Bradley named Citizens’ Climate Executive Director after strategic and legislative progress during interim leadership role
Ricky Bradley named Citizens’ Climate Executive Director after strategic and legislative progress during interim leadership role
Dec. 22, 2025 – After a six month interim period, Ricky Bradley has been appointed Executive Director of Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Citizens’ Climate Education. The decision was made by the CCL and CCE boards of directors in a unanimous vote during their final joint board meeting of 2025.
“Citizens’ Climate Lobby is fortunate to have someone with Ricky Bradley’s experience, commitment, and demeanor to lead the organization,” said CCL board chair Bill Blancato. “I can’t think of anyone with as much knowledge about CCL and its mission who is held in such high regard by CCL’s staff and volunteers.”
Bradley has been active with Citizens’ Climate for more than 13 years. Prior to his former roles as Interim Executive Director and Vice President of Field Operations, he has also served as a volunteer Group Leader and volunteer Regional Coordinator, all of which ground him in Citizens’ Climate’s grassroots model. Bradley has also led strategic planning and implementation efforts at HSBC, helping a large team adopt new approaches and deliver on big organizational goals.
“We are confident that Ricky has the skills to guide CCL during a challenging time for organizations trying to make a difference on climate change,” Blancato added.
Since stepping into the Interim Executive Director role in July 2025, Bradley has led Citizens’ Climate through a season of high volunteer engagement and effective advocacy on Capitol Hill. Under his leadership, CCL staff and volunteers organized a robust virtual lobby week with 300+ constituent meetings, despite an extended government shutdown, and executed a targeted mobilization to support the bipartisan passage of climate-friendly forestry legislation through the Senate Agriculture Committee.
“We have heard nothing but glowing descriptions of Ricky’s ability as a leader, as a manager, and as a team player,” said CCE board chair Dr. Sandra Kirtland Turner. “We’ve been absolutely thrilled with how Ricky’s brought the team together over the last six months to deliver on a new strategic plan for the organization.”
The strategic plan, which launched during CCL’s Fall Conference in November, details Citizens’ Climate’s unique role in the climate advocacy space, its theory of change for effectively moving federal climate legislation forward, and its strategic goals for 2026.
“Ricky has the heart of a CCLer and the strategic chops to take us into the next chapter as an organization,” Dr. Kirtland Turner said.
Bradley shared his vision for that next chapter in his conference opening remarks last month and, most recently, during the organization’s December monthly meeting.
“There’s a lot that we don’t control in today’s politics, but we do know who we are. The power of our persistent, nonpartisan advocacy is unmistakable,” Bradley said. “If we stay true to that, deepen our skills, and walk forward together, I know we’re going to meet this moment and deliver real results for the climate.”
CONTACT: Flannery Winchester, CCL Vice President of Marketing and Communications, 615-337-3642, flannery@citizensclimate.org
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Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change. Learn more at citizensclimatelobby.org.
The post Ricky Bradley named Citizens’ Climate Executive Director after strategic and legislative progress during interim leadership role appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 19 December 2025: EU’s petrol car U-turn; Trump to axe ‘leading’ research lab; What climate scientists are reading
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
EU easing up
HITTING THE BREAKS: The EU “walked back” its target to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2035, “permitting some new combustion engine cars”, reported Agence-France Presse. Under the original plan, the bloc would have had to cut emissions entirely by 2035 on new vehicles, but will now only have to cut emissions by 90% by that date, compared to 2021 levels. However, according to the Financial Times, some car manufacturers have “soured” on the reversal.
ADJUSTING CBAM: Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that the EU is making plans to “close loopholes” in the bloc’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) before it goes into effect in January. CBAM is set to be the world’s first carbon border tax and has drawn ire from key trading partners. The EU has also finalised a plan to delay its anti-deforestation legislation for another year, according to Carbon Pulse.
Around the world
- NCAR NO MORE: The Trump administration is moving to “dismantle” the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said USA Today, describing it as “one of the world’s leading climate research labs”.
- DEADLY FLOODS: The deadliest flash flooding in Morocco in a decade killed “at least” 37 people, while residents accused the government of “ignoring known flood risks and failing to maintain basic infrastructure”, reported Radio France Internationale.
- FAILING GRADE: The past year was the “warmest and wettest” ever recorded in the Arctic, with implications for “global sea level rise, weather patterns and commercial fisheries”, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2025 Arctic report card, covered by NPR.
- POWER TO THE PEOPLE: Reuters reported that Kenya signed a $311m agreement with an African infrastructure fund and India’s Power Grid Corporation for the “construction of two high-voltage electricity transmission lines” that could provide power for millions of people.
- BP’S NEW EXEC: BP has appointed Woodside Energy Group’s Meg O’Neill as its new chief executive amid a “renewed push to…double down on oil and gas after retreating from an ambitious renewables strategy”, said Reuters.
29
The number of consecutive years in which the Greenland ice sheet has experienced “continuous annual ice loss”, according to a Carbon Brief guest post.
Latest climate research
- Up to 4,000 glaciers could “disappear” per year during “peak glacier extinction”, projected to occur sometime between 2041 and 2055 | Nature Climate Change
- The rate of sea level rise across the coastal US doubled over the past century | AGU Advances
- Repression and criminalisation of climate and environmentally focused protests are a “global phenomena”, according to an analysis of 14 countries | Environmental Politics
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The latest coal market report from the International Energy Agency said that global coal use will reach record levels in 2025, but will decline by the end of the decade. Carbon Brief analysis of the report found that projected coal use in China for 2027 has been revised downwards by 127m tonnes, compared to the projection from the 2024 report – “more than cancelling out the effects of the Trump administration’s coal-friendly policies in the US”.
Spotlight
What climate scientists are curious about
This week, Carbon Brief spoke to climate scientists attending the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, Louisiana, about the most interesting research papers they read this year.
Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Dr Christopher Callahan, assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington
The most interesting research paper I read was a simple thought experiment asking when we would have known humans were changing the climate if we had always had perfect observations. The authors show that we could have detected a human influence on the climate as early as the 1880s, since we have a strong physical understanding of how those changes should look. This paper both highlights that we have been discernibly changing the climate for centuries and emphasises the importance of the modern climate observing network – a network that is currently threatened by budget cuts and staff shortages.
Prof Lucy Hutyra, distinguished professor at Boston University
The most interesting paper I read was in Nature Climate Change, where the researchers looked at how much mortality was associated with cold weather versus hot weather events and found that many more people died during cold weather events. Then, they estimated how much of a protective factor in the urban heat island is on those winter deaths and suggested that the winter benefits exceed the summer risks of mitigating extreme heat, so perhaps we shouldn’t mitigate extreme heat in cities.
This paper got me in a tizzy…It spurred an exciting new line of research. We’ll be publishing a response to this paper in 2026. I’m not sure their conclusion was correct, but it raised really excellent questions.
Dr Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central
This year was when we saw source attribution studies, such as Chris Callahan‘s, really start to break through and be able to connect the emissions of specific emitters…to the impact of those emissions through heat or some other sort of damage function. [This] is really game-changing.
What [Callahan’s] paper showed is that the emissions of individual companies have an impact on extreme heat, which then has an impact on the GDP of the countries experiencing that extreme heat. And so, for the first time, you can really say: “Company X caused this condition which then led to this economic damage.”
Dr Antonia Hadjimichael, assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University
It was about interdisciplinary work – not that anything in it is ground-shakingly new, but it was a good conversation around interdisciplinary teams and what makes them work and what doesn’t make them work. And what I really liked about it is that they really emphasise the role of a connector – the scientist that navigates this space in between and makes sure that the things kind of glue together…The reason I really like this paper is that we don’t value those scientists in academia, in traditional metrics that we have.
Dr Santiago Botía, researcher at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
The most interesting paper I’ve read this year was about how soil fertility and water table depth control the response to drought in the Amazon. They found very nicely how the proximity to soil water controls the anomalies in gross primary productivity in the Amazon. And, with that methodology, they could explain the response of recent droughts and the “greening” of the forest during drought, which is kind of a counterintuitive [phenomenon], but it was very interesting.
Dr Gregory Johnson, affiliate professor at the University of Washington
This article explores the response of a fairly coarse spatial resolution climate model…to a scenario in which atmospheric CO2 is increased at 1% a year to doubling and then CO2 is more gradually removed from the atmosphere…[It finds] a large release of heat from the Southern Ocean, with substantial regional – and even global – climate impacts. I find this work interesting because it reminds us of the important – and potentially nonlinear – roles that changing ocean circulation and water properties play in modulating our climate.
Cecilia Keating also contributed to this spotlight.
Watch, read, listen
METHANE MATTERS: In the Guardian, Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley wrote that the world must “urgently target methane” to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
CLIMATE WRAPPED: Grist summarised the major stories for Earth’s climate in 2025 – “the good, the bad and the ugly”.
COASTING: On the Coastal Call podcast, a biogeochemist spoke about “coastal change and community resilience” in the eastern US’s Long Island Sound.
Coming up
- 27 December: Cote D’Ivoire parliamentary elections
- 28 December: Central African Republic presidential and parliamentary elections
- 28 December: Guinean presidential election
Pick of the jobs
- BirdLife International, forest programme administrator | Salary: £28,000-£30,000. Location: Cambridge, UK
- World Resources Institute, power-sector transition senior manager | Salary: $116,000-$139,000. Location: Washington DC
- Fauna & Flora, operations lead for Liberia | Salary: $61,910. Location: Monrovia, Liberia
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 19 December 2025: EU’s petrol car U-turn; Trump to axe ‘leading’ research lab; What climate scientists are reading appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Electric vehicles (EVs) now account for more than one-in-four car sales around the world, but the next phase is likely to depend on government action – not just technological change.
That is the conclusion of a new report from the Centre for Net Zero, the Rocky Mountain Institute and the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute.
Our report shows that falling battery costs, expanding supply chains and targeted policy will continue to play important roles in shifting EVs into the mass market.
However, these are incremental changes and EV adoption could stall without efforts to ensure they are affordable to buy, to boost charging infrastructure and to integrate them into power grids.
Moreover, emerging tax and regulatory changes could actively discourage the shift to EVs, despite their benefits for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, air quality and running costs.
This article sets out the key findings of the new report, including a proposed policy framework that could keep the EV transition on track.
A global tipping point
Technology transformations are rarely linear, as small changes in cost, infrastructure or policy can lead to outsized progress – or equally large reversals.
The adoption of new technologies tends to follow a similar pathway, often described by an “S-curve”. This is divided into distinct phases, from early uptake, with rapid growth from very low levels, through to mass adoption and, ultimately, market saturation.
However, technologies that depend on infrastructure display powerful “path-dependency”, meaning decisions and processes made early within the rollout can lock in rapid growth, but equally, stagnation can also become entrenched, too.
EVs are now moving beyond the early-adopter phase and beginning to enter mass diffusion. There are nearly 60m on the road today, according to the International Energy Agency, up from just 1.2m a decade ago.
Technological shifts of this scale can unfold faster than expected. Early in the last century in the US, for example, millions of horses and mules virtually disappeared from roads in under three decades, as shown in the chart below left.
Yet the pace of these shifts is not fixed and depends on the underlying technology, economics, societal norms and the extent of government support for change. Faster or slower pathways for EV adoption are illustrated in the chart below right.
Internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles did not prevail in becoming the dominant mode of transport through technical superiority alone. They were backed by massive public investment in roads, city planning, zoning and highway expansion funded by fuel taxes.
Meanwhile, they faced few penalties for pollution and externalities, benefitting from implicit subsidies over cleaner alternatives. Standardisation, industrial policy and wartime procurement further entrenched the ICE.
EVs are well-positioned to follow a faster trajectory, as they directly substitute ICE vehicles while being cleaner, cheaper and quieter to run.
Past transitions show that like-for-like replacements – such as black-and-white to colour TVs – tend to diffuse faster than entirely novel products.
Late adopters also benefit from cost reductions and established norms. For example, car ownership took 60 years to diffuse across the US, but just 20 years in parts of Latin America and Japan.
In today’s globalised economy, knowledge, capital and supply chains travel faster still. Our research suggests that the global EV shift could be achieved within decades, not half a century.
Yet without decisive policy, investment and coordination, feedback loops could slow, locking in fossil-fuel dependence.
Our research suggests that further supporting the widespread deployment of EVs hangs on three interlinked actions: supporting adoption; integrating with clean electricity systems; and ensuring sustainability across supply chains and new mobility systems.
Closing the cost gap
EVs have long offered lower running costs than ICE vehicles, but upfront costs – while now cost-competitive in China, parts of Europe and in growing second-hand markets – remain a major barrier to adoption in most regions.
While battery costs have fallen sharply – lithium-ion battery packs fell by 20% in 2024 alone – this has not fully translated into lower retail vehicle prices for consumers.
In China, a 30% fall in battery prices in 2024 translated into a 10% decline in electric SUV prices. However, in Germany, EV retail prices rose slightly in 2024 despite a 20% drop in battery costs.
These discrepancies reflect market structures rather than cost fundamentals. Our report suggests that a competitive EV market, supported by transparent pricing and a strong second-hand sector, can help unlock cost parity in more markets.
Beyond the sale of EVs, government policy around running costs, such as fuel duty, has the potential to disincentivse EV adoption.
For example, New Zealand’s introduction of road-pricing for EVs contributed to a collapse in registrations from nearly 19% of sales in December 2023 to around 4% in January 2024.
EV-specific fees have also been introduced in a number of US states. Last month, the UK also announced a per-mile charge for EVs – but not ICEs – from 2028.
Addressing the loss of fuel-duty revenue as EVs replace ICE vehicles is a headache for any government seeking to electrify mobility.
However, to avoid slowing diffusion, new revenues could be used to build out new charging infrastructure, just as road-building was funded as the ICE vehicle was scaling up.
While subsidies to support upfront costs can help enable EV adoption, the best approach to encouraging uptake is likely to shift once the sector moves into a phase of mass diffusion.
Targeted support, alongside innovative financing models to broaden access, from blended finance to pay-as-you-drive schemes, could play a greater role in ensuring lower-income drivers and second-hand buyers are not left behind.
Mandates as engines of scale
Zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandates and ICE phase-out deadlines can reduce costs more effectively than alternatives by guaranteeing market scale, our research finds, reducing uncertainty for automakers and pushing learning rates forward through faster production.
California’s ZEV mandate was one of the first in the 1990s, a policy that has since been adopted by ten other US states and the UK.
China’s NEV quota system has produced the world’s fastest-growing EV market, while, in Norway, clear targets and consistent incentives mean EVs now account for nearly all of new car sales. These “technology-forcing” policies have proved highly effective.
Analyses consistently show that the long-run societal benefits of sales mandates for EVs far outweigh their compliance costs.
For example, the UK’s ZEV mandate has an estimated social net present value of £39bn, according to the government, driven largely by emissions reductions and lower running costs for consumers.
Benefits can also extend beyond national borders. For example, California’s “advanced clean cars II” regulations – adopted by a number of US states and an influence on other countries – have been instrumental in compelling US automakers to develop and commercialise EVs, which can, in turn, trigger innovation and scale to reduce costs worldwide.
Research suggests that, where possible, combining mandates and incentives creates further synergies: mandates alleviate supply-side constraints, making subsidies more effective on the demand side.
Public charging: a critical bottleneck
Public charging is one of the most significant impediments to EV adoption today.
Whereas EVs charged at home are substantially cheaper to run than ICE vehicles, higher public charging costs can erase this benefit – in the UK, this can be up to times the home equivalent.
While most homes in the UK, for example, do have access to off-street parking, there are large swathes of low-income and urban households without access to private driveways. For these households, a lack of cheap public charging has been described as a de facto “pavement tax”, which is disincentivising EV adoption and resulting in an inequitable transition.
Our research shows that a dual-track charging strategy could help resolve the situation. Expanding access to private charging – through cross-pavement cabling, “right-to-charge” legislation for renters and planning mandates for new developments could be combined with strategic investment in public charging, to overcome the “chicken-and-egg” problem for investors uncertain about future EV demand.
Meanwhile, “smart charging” in public settings – where EV demand is matched with cheaper electricity supply – can also help close the affordability gap, by delivering cheap off-peak charging that is already available to those charging at home.
The Centre for Net Zero’s research shows that drivers respond to dynamic pricing outside of the convenience of their homes, which reduces EV running costs below those of petrol cars.
The figure below shows that, while the level of discount being offered had the strongest impact, lower-income areas showed the largest behavioural response, indicating that they may stand to gain the most from a rollout of such incentives.
Our research suggests that policymakers could encourage this type of commercial offering by creating electricity markets with strong price signals and mandating that these prices are transparent to consumers.
Integrating with clean electricity grids
Electrification is central to decarbonising the world’s economies, meaning that sufficient capacity on electricity networks is becoming a key focus.
For the rollout of EVs, pressure will be felt most on low-voltage “distribution” networks, where charging is dispersed and tends to follow existing peaks and troughs in domestic demand.
Rather than responding to this challenge by just building out the grid – with the corresponding economic and political implications – making smart charging the norm could help mitigate pressure on the network.
Evidence from the Centre for Net Zero’s trials shows that AI-managed charging can shift EV demand off-peak, reducing residential peak load by 42%, as shown in the chart below.
Additionally, the amount of time when EVs are plugged in but not moving is often substantial, giving networks hours each day in which they can shift charging, targeting periods of low demand or high renewable output.
The system value of this flexible charging is significant. In the UK, managed charging could absorb 15 terrawatt hours (TWh) of renewable electricity that would otherwise be curtailed by 2030 – equivalent to Slovenia’s entire annual consumption.
For these benefits to be realised, our research suggests that global policymakers may need to mandate interoperability across vehicles, chargers and platforms, introduce dynamic network charges that reflect local grid stress and support AI-enabled automation.
Bi-directional charging – which allows EVs to export electricity to the grid, becoming decentralised, mobile storage units – remains underexploited. This could allow EVs to contribute to the capacity of the grid, helping with frequency and providing voltage support at both local and system levels.
The nascency of such vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology means that penetration is currently limited, but there are some markets that are further ahead.
For example, Utrecht is an early leader in real-world V2G deployment in a context of significant grid congestion, while Japan is exploring the use of V2G for system resilience, providing backup power during outages. China is also exploring V2G systems.
Our research shows that if just 25% of vehicles across six major European nations had V2G functionality, then the theoretical total capacity of the connected vehicles would exceed each of those country’s fossil-fuel power fleet.
Mandating V2G readiness at new chargepoints, aligning the value of exports with the value to the system and allowing aggregators to pool capacity from multiple EVs, could all help take V2G from theory to reality.
A sustainable EV system
It is important to note that electrification alone does not guarantee sustainability.
According to Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) analysis, the total weight of ore needed to electrify the world’s road transport system is around 1,410mtonnes (Mt). This is 40% less than the 2,150Mt of oil extracted every year to fuel a combustion-based system. EVs concentrate resource use upfront, rather than locking in fossil-fuel extraction.
Moreover, several strategies can reduce reliance on virgin minerals, including recycling, new chemistries and improved efficiency.
Recycling, in particular, is progressing rapidly. Some 90% of lithium-ion batteries could now be recycled in some regions, according to RMI research. Under an accelerated scenario, nearly all demand could be met through recycling before 2050.
Finally, while our report focuses largely on EVs, it is important to highlight that they are not a “silver bullet” for decarbonising mobility.
Cities such as Seoul and New York have demonstrated that micromobility, public transport and street redesign can cut congestion, improve health and reduce the number of overall vehicles required.
Better system design reduces mineral demand, lowers network strain and broadens access.
The ‘decision decade’ ahead
Policy decisions made today will determine whether EVs accelerate into exponential growth or stall.
Our research suggests that governments intent on capturing the economic and environmental dividends of electrified mobility are likely to need coherent, cross-cutting policy frameworks that push the market up the steep climb of the EV S-curve.
The post Guest post: How to steer EVs towards the road of ‘mass adoption’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How to steer EVs towards the road of ‘mass adoption’
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