The renewable energy revolution is now well underway, but many continue to underestimate just how fast and transformative it is going to be.

Despite a conservative approach to energy markets, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has just announced that ‘we are witnessing a transformation of global power markets led by renewables’. A bold statement that comes in the wake of new data showing that more than half of new power capacity added last year came from renewable energy sources like wind and solar power – beating fossil fuels for the first time.

The expansion of renewable capacity reflects impressive cost reductions for onshore wind and solar panels that would have been ‘unthinkable just five years ago’ according to the IEA, who fully expect the trend of declining costs to continue.

If rapid improvements continue in renewable energy and innovative technologies like electric vehicles, petroleum consumption will peak in 2030 and decline thereafter, according to a report from the World Energy Council. The plunging cost of renewable energy, with solar-module costs falling 50 percent since 2009, is already upending the business model of utilities.

Disruption could swiftly spread to the oil industry as electric vehicles become more economic than gasoline or diesel cars – potentially displacing millions of barrels of daily fuel use by the late 2020s.

We are already approaching a tipping point in the electric vehicle revolution according to industry experts. Technological advances in battery storage, vehicle design and interconnectivity are increasingly standing electric vehicles up as serious competition for fossil fuel-burning vehicles – even when it comes to performance and affordability.

Many governments can see the writing on the wall and several countries are competing to be the first to go beyond fuel-burning cars – including Germany, India, the Netherlands and Norway. China, the largest market in the world for electric vehicles, is aiming for a 10-fold increase in sales by 2025 and is offering up generous subsidies to support this drive.

As new and retrofitted electric vehicles become the norm, the whole soundscape of our cities is going to change. Alongside dramatic improvements to air quality, this has the potential to completely revolutionise modern life, but to fully realise the major benefits of switching to a clean transportation system other key sectors – in particular shipping and aviation – need to up their game. The current deadlock that is delaying an effective global deal to cut pollution from shipping, and attempts to expand major airports in the UK, France and Turkey, put these sectors behind vehicular transport in the race for adequate 21st century systems.