Production of wind turbines and solar panels soared in 2014, thanks to growing demand from China.
This rebound follows a slowdown in demand from developed countries and issues of overcapacity in recent years.
According to the Global Wind Energy Council, the global wind industry grew by 44% in 2014, with over 50 GW of capacity added.
At the same time, global production of solar panels rose by 30%, with a capacity of 40 GW added in 2014.
The Danish company Vestas is now the world's leading wind turbine manufacturer, followed by Germany's Siemens, China's Goldwind and General Electric of the US.
The top three solar panel producers of 2014 are based in China. Trina Solar leads the figures in 2014, followed by Yingli Green Energy and JinkoSolar. Canadian Solar came fourth, followed by Sharp Corp of Japan.
One reason underlying the boost in wind energy capacity was a rush to build wind farms in China, ahead of a feared subsidy cut.
However, according to Aris Karcanias, a managing director at business advisory group FTI Consulting, this masked the "underlying challenges facing the industry."
"The market is still very much dependent on subsidies", he said, pointing to a potential collapse of the US market this year if Congress fails to revise its wind power production tax credit.
The same issue had lead to a sharp slowdown after rapid growth of solar panel production in recent years.
According to findings in the Global Wind Supply Chain Update 2015, released in January by FTI Consulting, 25% of all wind turbine suppliers - 120 in number - have collapsed or stayed out of business in the last two years.
Karcanias criticised the "challenging economic and political climate", which forces turbine vendors to "shed low value assets and opt for outsourcing".
Feng Zhao, Director at FTI Consulting and Head of Wind Energy within the FTI-CL Energy practice described the non-participation of vendors as "a dangerous signal to governments".
He said:
To bring wind towards a position where it can compete head-to-head with conventional energy sources, it is imperative to find a balance between maintaining attractive and certain policy and reducing the burden on governments and consumers caused by paying renewable energy subsidy.
Whereas previously, solar panel production was strongly geared to subsidised demand for panels in developed countries, especially Europe, China now needs to promote domestic installations as an outlet for their solar panel production, which accounts for 75% of global panel manufacturing.
According to Ankit Mathur, project manager for alternative energy at Global Data, China's simplified approvals and permits for solar generation from buildings and other decentralised sources help achieve this, and contributed strongly to the aforementioned 30% growth in solar panel production.
Meanwhile, the supply of solar panels still exceeds demand despite the growth, with 15% more solar panels produced than merited by demand, according to the estimation by GlobalData.
A large contributing factor is the unwillingness of the Chinese government to allow solar producers to fold. Instead, takeovers and mergers have been instrumented by local governments, such as last year's buyout of the bankrupt Suntech, formerly the largest solar panel producer in the world.
Global demand for solar panels is set to grow continually according to future projections taking both increasing government emission targets, and dropping costs for panels - 80% since 2008 - into account.
India recently announced ambitious renewable energy targets, with an aim for 100 000 MW of solar energy generation by 2020, while also Japan, the Caribbean and the Middle East show increasing interest in large-scale solar energy generation.
Within the next 10 years, solar energy is likely to become the cheapest source of electricity in many regions of the world, a report from German think tank Agora Energiewende says.
