Chart of the month – August 2026. A central finding of the Energy Transition Outlook 2025 is that the world is moving from an age of energy addition to an age of energy transition. 

For most of modern history, new energy sources were added to the energy system rather than replacing existing ones. Coal was added to biomass, oil to coal, and natural gas to both. That trend is now beginning to bend for good. Clean energy is not only fully meeting new incremental energy demand growth but is starting to take market share from fossil sources.  

Despite rapid growth in solar, wind, and other low-carbon technologies, fossil fuels still provide around 80% of global energy. Their persistence reflects more than historical momentum. Fossil fuels are energy-dense, easily transported, relatively inexpensive to produce, and supported by extensive infrastructure built over more than a century. In sectors such as heavy industry, transport, and heating, they remain difficult to replace. Despite these advantages, decision makers and consumers will increasingly find fossil energy to be insufficiently secure, cheap, and clean relative to non-fossil energy. As we show above, the fossil 'slice' of the pie will fall below 50% in the space of a single generation.  

Renewables face challenges of their own. Solar and wind resources are abundant and increasingly inexpensive, but generation remains variable. Expanding grids, storage, transmission networks, and demand flexibility requires significant investment and time. Renewable energy systems also require more land and infrastructure than conventional fuels. As a result, renewable deployment has grown rapidly but, until recently, not at a scale sufficient to displace large volumes of fossil fuel use. 

Our forecast suggests that a new phase has begun. Growing energy security concerns and climate policies, combined with continued declines in the cost of solar, wind, and batteries, are enabling non-fossil technologies to compete directly with fossil fuels across a growing range of applications. 

 

 

In the period from 2023 to 2025, it is already a fact that non-fossil grew by 16 EJ while fossil only grew 10 EJ. And this is a trend now accelerating and locked in for the long term. We forecast that fossil demand is now entering a plateauing phase for a few years, before decreasing from 2030. By 2035 already, almost 30 EJ of fossil demand will have disappeared, equivalent to the energy content of about 2,500 VLCCs of crude oil.  

In 2050, fossil demand will be back to its 2000 level, while non-fossil demand will have quadrupled . 

This means one thing: clean energy is no longer meeting only incremental growth in demand. It is also capturing market share from fossil fuels. This marks a fundamental change in the energy system. Fossil fuels do not disappear. In our forecast, they still account for more than a third of global energy use in 2060. However, they enter a period of structural decline, while non-fossil energy expands to meet both new demand and a growing share of existing demand.