Annual clean energy investment tops 90% of all energy spending for first time

Story: 2033 C.E. ???  |  Last updated: January 5, 2026

Note: This is an imagined future story, written as if a projected milestone has occurred. It is based on current trends and evidence, not confirmed events.

For the first time in recorded energy history, clean energy investment has crossed the 90% threshold — meaning more than nine out of every ten dollars spent on new energy infrastructure globally in 2033 C.E. went toward solar, wind, storage, grids, efficiency, and other low-carbon technologies. The milestone, tracked by the International Energy Agency, marks what analysts are calling a structural end to the fossil fuel investment era, not as a policy aspiration but as a financial reality.

Key projections

• Clean energy investment: Global clean energy spending reached an estimated $3.8 trillion in 2033 C.E., representing more than 90% of all energy investment for the first time on record.
• Fossil fuel spending: Investment in coal, oil, and gas infrastructure fell to under $400 billion — down from over $1 trillion at the start of the 2020s — as declining demand eroded returns and stranded-asset risks drove institutional capital away.
• Starting point: In 2022 C.E., the IEA reported that clean energy spending was on track to reach roughly $1.4 trillion — already a record at the time, but still less than 60% of total energy investment globally.

How we got here

The trajectory was visible as early as 2022 C.E., when the IEA noted that clean energy spending was growing at roughly twice the pace of fossil fuel investment. That gap widened through the mid-2020s as solar and battery costs continued to fall, making renewables the cheapest source of new electricity generation in most of the world.

Policy acceleration mattered too. Major economies locked in long-term clean energy procurement frameworks, and emerging markets — particularly in South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America — became the fastest-growing destinations for renewable capital. By 2028 C.E., clean energy had crossed 75% of total energy investment. The final climb to 90% took five more years.

Indigenous-led energy cooperatives and community-owned solar projects, often overlooked in headline investment figures, contributed meaningfully to the shift in countries including Canada, Australia, and across the Pacific Islands — demonstrating that the transition was not solely driven by large institutional players.

What the numbers mean on the ground

The 90% figure is a financial signal, but its effects are physical. Grid operators in Europe and parts of North America now dispatch fossil fuels only as emergency backup on rare high-demand days. Across much of the Global South, off-grid and mini-grid solar has extended electricity access to hundreds of millions of people who were not connected to centralized power systems in 2022 C.E.

This is one of many renewable energy milestones that have compounded over the past decade. Capacity additions that seemed ambitious in the early 2020s became the floor, not the ceiling, as financing costs for clean projects dropped and supply chains matured.

The IEA’s tracking also shows that grid infrastructure — transmission lines, smart inverters, demand-response systems — now accounts for nearly one-quarter of all clean energy investment. Early in the transition, grid spending lagged badly behind generation capacity. That bottleneck, which threatened to strand new wind and solar projects, drew concentrated policy attention after several high-profile curtailment crises in the late 2020s.

The unfinished work

The milestone does not mean the transition is complete. A substantial share of the world’s existing fossil fuel infrastructure — power plants, industrial furnaces, shipping fleets, aviation — remains in operation and continues to emit. Investment flows have shifted; the physical stock of energy infrastructure changes far more slowly.

Access gaps also persist. The IEA projects that despite record investment, several dozen lower-income countries still face chronic underinvestment relative to their energy needs. Clean energy capital remains concentrated in wealthier markets, and the cost of financing projects in lower-income economies can run two to three times higher than in the U.S. or Europe — a gap that multilateral finance institutions have narrowed but not closed.

There is also the question of critical minerals. The scale of battery, solar panel, and grid equipment manufacturing required to sustain current investment levels has intensified pressure on lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel supply chains. Some of the communities living near extraction sites — particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, and Indonesia — have raised serious concerns about labor conditions and environmental damage that the clean energy transition cannot simply paper over with investment headlines.

A turning point that took decades to build

Historians of energy will likely mark the early 2020s as the period when the investment crossover became inevitable, even if it took another decade to play out fully. The IEA’s 2022 C.E. data showed clean energy at a record pace; subsequent annual investment reports traced the acceleration year by year.

What made the difference was not a single policy or technology but a compounding of many: falling renewable costs documented by IRENA, corporate net-zero commitments that reshaped procurement, national industrial strategies in the U.S., E.U., China, and India, and the steady withdrawal of major banks and pension funds from new fossil fuel project financing under net-zero finance alliances.

None of those forces alone would have been enough. Together, over time, they moved the most capital-intensive industry on Earth. The 90% figure is the arithmetic result of that movement — a number that would have seemed implausible to most energy analysts in 2015 C.E., and that now simply describes where the money goes.

For context on other dimensions of the energy transition, the Our World in Data renewable energy tracker offers a long-run view of how capacity, generation, and investment have evolved together.

Read more

For more on this story, see: IEA — Record clean energy spending, 2022

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
• Global suicide rate has fallen by 40% since 1995
• The Good News for Humankind archive on renewable energy

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