Renewables, ‘Electrostates’, and other Myths of the Green Transition

The start of this month marked the publication of the 75th edition of the Energy Institute’s 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy, the flagship publicly available dataset on global energy production, consumption, trade and emissions. First issued in 1950, and produced by BP for most of its history before moving to the Energy Institute in recent years, the Review has long offered one of the clearest annual snapshots of how the world energy system actually looks. The 2026 edition was produced in partnership with Ember, a climate and energy think tank, Kearney, a global management consultancy, and KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting and consulting firms. Its publication could not be timelier, arriving in the shadow of the ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran, spikes in energy prices, interruptions to supply, and renewed calls by governments and corporations to double down on “energy security”. 

This year, the major underlying theme of the Review is the question of energy transition. As the foreword puts it, the Review is “a global public good: an independent, evidence-based anchor to inform decisions and support a just, secure and low carbon energy transition.” At first glance, the Review appears to give plenty of support for an optimistic reading of this shift in the global energy system. As Ember puts it, the last 75 years was “a fossil-powered growth story”, but today “the data show that supply growth is increasingly renewable and electric”. In 2025, renewables were the largest source of growth in total energy supply for the first time in history outside a recession. Solar power accounted for around 71 per cent of this increase, while solar generation grew by 30 per cent in a single year. 

The data on electricity generation appear to confirm an accelerating shift to renewables even more dramatically, led above all by China, which the Review describes as the world’s largest ‘electrostate’. Global electricity generation rose by 3 per cent to 32,202 TWh in 2025, but renewables grew by more than the total increase in global electricity demand. Solar alone added 650 TWh, reaching 8.7 per cent of global power generation, overtaking wind and almost equalling nuclear. Even in the United States, where the Trump administration has doubled down on oil and gas while directing a bizarre hostility towards “windmills”, the data seem to cut against the reactionary fantasy of a fossil-fuel revival. US solar capacity increased by nearly 20% from 2024, and wind capacity by 4%. Renewables now account for around one-fifth of electricity generation in the US.

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Techno-Fetishist Illusions

But these Pollyanna-ish readings of an accelerating march towards a climate friendly future crumble on closer examination. In reality, as the data shows, the world is not replacing fossil fuels with renewables – rather renewables are being layered upon an existing fossil fuel base. According to the Review, total global energy supply exceeded 600 EJ in 2025, rising 1.7 per cent from the previous year. Fossil fuels still account for 86 per cent of that supply, roughly the same as 2024, with absolute levels of oil, gas, and coal increasing in 2025. Indeed, 2025 saw the largest production and consumption of fossil fuels in history, as did 2024 and 2023 before it. It has only been at moments of major economic rupture, such as the downturn of the early 1980s or the Covid-19 pandemic, that global fossil fuel use has temporarily fallen. The entirely predictable result of this increase in fossil fuel production was an increase in CO2 emissions, with global energy-sector CO₂ emissions rising by 1.1 percent in 2025.

The basic problem is that so much discussion of the so-called ‘energy transition’ treats the problem as a technical challenge of substituting one set of energy inputs with another. This ignores the deeper social and economic logics of capitalism, in which the drive to accumulate is tied to a persistent expansion of energy throughput. More energy is drawn into production, circulation and consumption, even when the amount of energy used per unit of output declines. Efficiency gains do not automatically reduce total energy use. Instead, they support even greater levels of absolute production and consumption. 

This is the techno-fetishism at the heart of the “green transition” narrative. By focusing on the changing relative shares of energy supply, it evades the central question of absolute production. It is perfectly plausible for fossil fuels to fall as a share of the energy mix while the absolute quantity of coal, oil and gas consumed continues to rise. This is exactly what is happening. But the climate does not care whether fossil fuels occupy a slightly smaller percentage of a larger energy system, while the total volume of carbon being extracted and released is increasing. A world in which renewables rise rapidly while fossil fuel use also grows is not a world in transition. 

Electrification is not decarbonisation 

China is presented by many as the great counterexample to these trends. The Review itself points to the country’s extraordinarily rapid build-out of solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles over the last decade, which is undoubtedly historically significant. In 2025, Chinese solar generation rose by 40 per cent and wind by 13 per cent compared to 2024. By the end of the year, China accounted for just over half of all installed solar capacity in the world, with 1,202 GW out of a global total of 2,392 GW. As a result of this enormous expansion in renewable capacity, coal-fired electricity generation fell slightly, while electric vehicles helped curb demand growth for petrol and diesel.

But China cannot escape the fundamental dynamics of energy use in capitalism. The Review’s data show no absolute reduction in China’s overall fossil fuel use – but the exact opposite. Chinese oil consumption increased by 2.8 per cent in 2025. Oil was the second-largest source of China’s energy supply growth after solar. China’s coal, gas and oil production all increased, and its rapidly growing chemicals sector has become a major driver of both coal and oil demand. In short, China is building the infrastructure of electrification while continuing to expand the material foundations of fossil-fuelled industrial production – the so-called ‘electrostate’ remains very much grounded in fossil fuels.

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The significance of these trends in electrification is starkly illustrated by the global expansion of data centres. Usefully, this year’s Review includes, for the first time, a special section on this infrastructure. Globally, the power demand of data centres almost doubled between 2020 and 2025, and they now consume almost as much electricity as the entire annual increase in global renewable generation in 2025. Today, data centres use more power than the total electricity generated in all but five countries, with the United States and China accounting for 40 per cent and 26 per cent of global data centre electricity demand respectively.

This confirms the additive, rather than substitutive, character of energy consumption under capitalism. New renewable capacity is being drawn into new forms of accumulation around AI, cloud computing, logistics, surveillance, and platform economies. Importantly, these infrastructures do not only consume electricity. They also require vast amounts of water for cooling, steel and concrete for construction, copper and rare earths for transmission and hardware, and enormous material supply chains stretching across the globe. Electrification, in other words, is just another vector for the overall expansion of capitalist production.

Shifting Geographies of World Energy

The Review also illustrates how the geographies of global energy demand and production are changing. OECD economies once dominated world energy consumption but today the Asia-Pacific region is central. The Review notes that OECD economies accounted for 70 per cent of total energy supply in 1965, but now account for only around a third (even though per capita energy supply remains higher in OECD countries compared to the non-OECD). Between 2016 and 2025, China was responsible for 71 per cent of the increase in Asia-Pacific total energy supply, while India accounted for 17 per cent.

In part, these shifts reflect wider transformations in global capitalism. The rise of China as a central hub of global manufacturing, alongside the expansion of export-oriented production across East and South Asia, has redrawn the map of world energy demand. Energy-intensive industries, basic commodity production and large segments of global supply chains have increasingly been concentrated in these regions, even as much of the final consumption of goods remains focused on North America and Europe. The result is a world market in which the apparent decline of energy use in some OECD countries is inseparable from the shift of industrial production – and thus energy demand – elsewhere.

These changing geographies of energy consumption complicate nationally bounded measures of carbon emissions. A country can reduce the energy used within its own borders – as the UK did by more than 20 percent between 2015 and 2025 according to the Review – while continuing to consume goods whose production has shifted elsewhere. This may lower its measure of territorial emissions, especially if domestic manufacturing declines or becomes less carbon intensive. But again, what matters for the climate is the absolute global production and consumption of fossil fuels. When emissions are displaced through global supply chains rather than eliminated, apparent national progress becomes little more than an accounting trick.

The Energy Institute provides an invaluable service by making these statistics publicly available each year. But a genuine assessment of the world’s climate predicament needs to break with the kinds of transition boosterism we see in this year’s Review, and instead be grounded in a critique of really-existing-capitalism. The central problem is not the pace at which renewables are being added, but the social and economic system that determines trajectories of global energy use. A real transition can only happen through the rapid and permanent reduction in the absolute consumption of coal, oil and gas, not through the layering of new sources of energy on top of these fossil fuels. Without this, fanciful talk of a ‘green transition’ becomes little more than ideological cover for a world moving ever faster towards climate catastrophe.