The world's 'most renewable' economies tend to be its poorest — one energy metric blends modern solar and hydro with the wood and charcoal households still burn

The World Bank publishes "Renewable energy consumption (% of total final energy consumption)" as indicator EG.FEC.RNEW.ZS, drawn from the IEA-led Tracking SDG7 dataset. By its definition the metric is the share of all renewable energy — hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biofuels and waste, the last category including the traditional burning of wood, charcoal, crop residue and dung — in a country's total final energy consumption. The database vintage was last updated 2026-07-13; the latest year with broad country coverage is 2021, with values for 212 economies. Across those 212 economies the share runs from 0 to 96.3%. The 20 highest are, with two exceptions, in sub-Saharan Africa: the Democratic Republic of Congo (96.3%), Somalia (95.4%), Liberia (93.2%), Gabon (91.3%), Uganda (91.0%), the Central African Republic (90.9%), Ethiopia (90.6%), Guinea-Bissau (87.4%), Madagascar (83.6%) and Burundi (83.1%). The two non-African economies in the top 20 are Iceland (82.4%) and Bhutan (81.8%). The 15 lowest shares — 0 to 0.5% — belong to oil and gas producers and small territories: Bahrain, Brunei Darussalam, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia all report 0.1% or below, alongside Algeria, Turkmenistan and Trinidad and Tobago. The metric falls as income rises. Median renewable share by World Bank income group in 2021: low-income 76.9%, lower-middle-income 42.2%, upper-middle-income 13.8%, high-income 11.6%. The correlation between the natural log of GDP per capita and renewable share across 205 economies is −0.58. At the aggregate level (2020 vintage, the latest for the regional and income series), sub-Saharan Africa's renewable share is 70.3%, the world's 19.7%, and high-income economies' 12.8%. A second series bears directly on the pattern. On the World Bank's "Access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking" indicator (EG.CFT.ACCS.ZS, 2022), the 15 highest-renewable economies report a median clean-cooking access of 4.8%, and 14 of the top 20 give fewer than 15 in 100 people such access. Across the 187 economies present in both series, renewable share and clean-cooking access move in opposite directions: the correlation is −0.69. Iceland reports 82.4% renewable and 100% clean-cooking access; Burundi reports 83.1% renewable and 0.2%; the Democratic Republic of Congo, 96.3% and 4.8%.

The following is analysis, not fact. Read one country at a time, the metric behaves: Iceland's geothermal-and-hydro grid earns a high renewable share, a Gulf petro-state earns a low one, and the number tracks the story you expect. Read across all 212 economies in a single pull, it inverts — the poorer the country, the higher its "renewable" share — and the reason is that the metric deliberately aggregates all renewable sources into one final-energy share — so it cannot distinguish modern renewables from traditional biomass, and is easily misread as a transition metric [analysis]. Iceland, Bhutan and Gabon pair a high renewable share with near-universal clean cooking (100%, 90.6%, 91.0%); the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Uganda pair a comparable share with almost none (4.8%, 0.2%, 1.6%). Clean-cooking access is only a proxy — it does not decompose any country's energy mix — but across the panel the two move sharply opposite (a strong −0.69 correlation), which is consistent with the high scores at the low-access end resting on traditional solid biomass rather than modern renewables ^sspeculative. On that reading the metric's highest values would, in much of the low-income range, track energy poverty rather than an energy transition — an inference the proxy supports but does not prove ^sspeculative. The metric is not wrong; it measures exactly what it defines, and burned wood is counted as renewable on the reasoning that a regrown tree reabsorbs its carbon — though whether it is genuinely low-net-emission depends on the accounting boundary, the regrowth horizon and supply-chain emissions ^sspeculative. The misreading happens one level up, when "X% renewable" is taken as a proxy for clean, modern or low-carbon energy — the sense in which the figure usually appears in climate coverage and corporate targets. Across this series that reading runs backwards: on the 2021 data the economy with the highest renewable share (DR Congo, 96.3%) is also among those where the fewest people can cook without smoke (4.8%). Read as a clean-energy scorecard — the sense in which the figure usually appears — the aggregate can point the wrong way [analysis].

The strongest counter is that the indicator is behaving correctly and the fault is entirely in the reading. Traditional biomass genuinely is renewable, and in strict carbon accounting regrown fuelwood is treated as low-net-emission; a country deriving most of its energy from it is, by the metric's own terms, highly renewable. On that view the number is honest and the only error is the reader's assumption that "renewable" means "modern." The exceptions matter and cut against an over-strong claim. Iceland, Bhutan and Gabon sit in the top 20 with clean-cooking access at or above 90% — genuinely modern renewable systems built on geothermal and hydropower. So "high renewable share equals biomass" is a strong tendency, not a law; 3 of the top 20 break it, and the composition of any single country's share is not something these two indicators measure directly. Clean-cooking access is a proxy for the presence of traditional biomass, not a decomposition of the energy mix — which is why the biomass reading here is tagged as an inference, not a fact ^mmodeled. Two further cautions: the regional and income aggregates are 2020 vintage while the country detail is 2021, so the two are not from the identical year; and both series carry the usual estimation and revision caveats of modelled energy-balance data. Whether the headline metric "misleads" is a judgment about how it is used, not a property of the numbers, which are exactly what they claim to be.

The same 70% reads two ways. From a climate-accounting vantage, sub-Saharan Africa's high renewable share is a low-fossil-dependence success — the region that has done least to warm the planet also leans least on coal, oil and gas for its final energy. From an energy-access vantage, the identical figure can reflect deprivation: a high share is consistent with modern energy — grid electricity, gas or electric cooking — not having arrived, leaving wood and charcoal to fill the gap ^sspeculative. The custodian institutions behind the number (the IEA, IRENA, the UN Statistics Division, the World Bank and the WHO, through the Tracking SDG7 process) flag traditional-biomass use as a known limitation of the headline share, and report clean-cooking access as a separate indicator. The dataset cannot say which vantage is correct; it can show that on this measure, in aggregate across the panel, the greenest-looking economies and the smokiest kitchens track each other.