World Investing Almost 2× More Into Clean Energy As Fossil Fuels Now!

One way to predict where the future is headed is to look at what human society is investing in. 100 years ago, we were investing a ton into fossil fuel development, and we then burnt up a lot of fossil fuels. Even 15 years ago, human society was investing more into fossil fuels than clean energy. However, that was the last year that was the case. Since then, investments in clean energy have been growing, especially since 2021. On the flip side, investments in fossil fuels are well below what they were in 2015. The result: clean energy investments are nearly double fossil fuel investments in 2024.

A lot of people still don’t understand that clean energy is beating fossil fuels, let alone doubling its investments. However, we’ve got a lot of other signs of this.

As we just published, electricity generation from wind power is now beating electricity generation from coal in the United States.

Investments in solar power have far outdone predictions in the past decade:

We seem to have hit the era of peak fossil fuels.

We’ve also seen things like the collapse of coal in coal country, as evidenced by this chart:

The cleantech revolution is happening. Stat after stat and chart after chart show that. But getting back to that IEA report referenced at the top, let’s dig into the details a little more.

The second key point, ellipsis included, is the following: “…but there are major imbalances in investment, and Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDE) outside China account for only around 15% of global clean energy spending.”

Indeed, when we split out where the world’s investments in clean energy (and fossil fuels) are taking place, we can see that China is driving what’s happening, good or bad, followed by the United States and Europe. Renewable energy investments are still beating fossil fuel investments in the rest of the world, but investments in energy overall are dominated by those three juggernauts, and most of all China.

What is perhaps most notable and jumped out to me in this chart is how much was being invested in energy efficiency (which typically offers the best return on investment) and power grids and storage. Overall, though fossil fuel investments are a fraction of cleantech investments. At the same time … we really shouldn’t be investing in fossil fuels at all at this point!

But here’s a big one, a fun one, even an exceptional one:

Investments in solar power development are beating investments in all other generation technologies combined. Solar power is clearly the technology of choice for new power capacity globally at this point.

“Solar panel costs have decreased by 30% over the last two years, and prices for minerals and metals crucial for energy transitions have also sharply dropped, especially the metals required for batteries.” That has clearly had a key role in driving these trends.

I’ll end with two charts and a quote showing that investments from households are a surprisingly significant portion of the world’s overall investments in energy generation technologies.

“Households are emerging as important actors for consumer-facing clean energy investments, highlighting the importance of affordability and access to capital,” IEA writes.

Overall, we have a lot of good signs of clean energy progress and the decline of fossil fuels. Some people and organizations would like you to believe otherwise as they cling on to the past (and their money, if they are intertwined with the fossil fuel industry, which is usually the case), but clean energy is winning and will keep on winning, led by solar energy. The future is bright. (But it’s also hot, unless we speed up this transition even much faster.)