Who gets the world’s clean electricity?

As efforts to transition the world’s energy system accelerate, a question is emerging that climate diplomacy has barely started to grapple with. Who will get access to the world's clean electricity supply?

We’ve had a taste of this in Australian domestic politics, as community concern has grown about data centres. In Australia, data centres could consume (Opens in new window) as much electricity as electrifying homes, transport and businesses combined. This prompted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to announce (Opens in new window) new expectations on data centres to become net generators of renewable energy and firming.

But the issues being discussed in Australia are reflective of a broader unresolved tension. Globally, data centres are expected to consume as much electricity as Japan (Opens in new window) by 2030. This, as around 2 billion people presently lack access to clean cooking and 730 million people worldwide still live without electricity (Opens in new window).

The greatest energy divide is in Africa, home to 85% of the world’s (Opens in new window)energy poor. Yet in the Pacific, four out of five Papua New Guineans (Opens in new window) and more than a third of Vanuatu's population lack electricity access. Even Australia is not immune to energy inequality: many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples still lack reliable access to electricity (Opens in new window).

Energy availability, taken for granted in developed economies, is key to improving access to basic rights like clean air, health care, education and communication, for the millions of people currently impacted by the energy divide.

All but one of the latest International Energy Agency (Opens in new window) (IEA) scenarios assume this energy divide will persist, with Africa’s per capita electricity use projected to grow only marginally compared with other regions. Without policy change, people living in African and small island developing states will remain starved of electricity, while those in regions like North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China will enjoy its ever-growing benefits.

The energy transition requires extensive renewal and expansion of the world’s energy infrastructure, but most of this new capacity is expected to be built in already developed economies. Only 5% of capacity additions through to 2050 occur in Africa, according to the IEA, despite its share of the global population growing to 25%. Projects under consideration explicitly aim to capture sun and wind (Opens in new window) in Africa for transmission to developed markets. This is while per capita energy use (Opens in new window) and associated emissions for Africa (Opens in new window) remain around 80% below the global average.

This raises a fundamental challenge: how can we direct the enormous global growth in clean energy to ensure a just transition that meets the basic needs of all people at the same time as we reduce emissions?

A different future is possible. In 2025, the IEA added the “Achieving access for all” (ACCESS) scenario to its energy outlook (Opens in new window), which shows how universal electricity access could be substantially achieved by 2035 with annual investments of US$23 billion – less than 1% of what the world spends on its militaries (Opens in new window). This will require a major shift in international priorities, but policies that grow Africa and the Pacific’s energy access, while decoupling emissions growth, are the key challenge for action on climate and human wellbeing.

Australia has an opportunity to lead this conversation at COP31. The COP30 Action Agenda (Opens in new window) already identifies “universal access to energy” as a core objective. As President of Negotiations, Australia can work alongside its Pacific pre-COP co-hosts to influence increased effort and focus going into this objective. Together, Australia and the Pacific can show the world what meaningful climate leadership looks like by placing equity at the centre of global climate action.

There are pragmatic reasons for industrialised countries to support the policy shifts needed to achieve universal energy access by 2035. Energy-poor countries are unlikely to simply stand and patiently wait, while the developed and industrialised countries replace and expand their energy supply. Rather, inaction opens up the prospect of three high risk pathways: energy poor countries turn to fossil fuels, with serious implications for the global emissions budget, or they may embrace renewables, meaning we have massively underestimated the materials needed for the transition, or unmet energy needs fuel conflict.

The practical implications of basing global plans on faulty premises is reason enough to elevate a focus on energy access in the COP31 agenda.