The Small Farm Future Blog

Stop Press, Same News: No energy transition, again

Posted on July 9, 2026 | 3 Comments

Every year I take a look at the annual energy data published toward the end of June by the Energy Institute in order to ask the big question: Has the energy transition that everyone keeps talking about actually started yet?

So far, the answer has always been no. Every year since 1983, total global fossil fuel supply has increased, apart from in 2009 (financial crisis) and 2020 (Covid), when the entire energy system nosedived in relation to those crises before rebooting to the status quo ante.

And so we come to the recently published 2025 figures, where the answer is … also no. We used more of every type of primary energy in 2025 than ever before. Yes, more photovoltaics, wind, hydro and nuclear than before, but also more coal, oil and gas were burned in 2025 than in any previous year in human history. Still no transition!

I prepared a couple of charts in Excel to show some of the figures, as I’ve done in previous years. But somehow I can’t get them to size properly in WordPress – if anyone has any wizardly advice on how to do this, please let me know. For now, I’ll just reel off some figures instead. So, the global energy supply in 2025 comprised 518 exajoules of fossil energy, and 83 exajoules of everything else, with fossils comprising 86.2 percent of the total, down from 86.6 percent in 2024. Thus, for the first time in human history, humanity’s primary energy use exceeded 600 exajoules. Which is the equivalent of all 8.2 billion people in the world boiling the water for a cup of coffee about 2,400 times every day.

As is usually the case these days, the greatest proportionate rise was with renewables (photovoltaics and wind), which increased by nearly 10 percent on the previous year. In 2025, renewables comprised 5.9 percent of global energy supply, up from 5.4 percent the previous year. In absolute terms, renewable energy supply increased by 3.2 exajoules from 2024-5 whereas fossil energy supply increased by 4.6 exajoules.

So, to reiterate – not a transition.

Proponents of renewable transition often point out that due to the greater efficiency of electrical processes that don’t produce waste heat in the way that fossil fuel combustion does, you need less renewable than fossil energy to power the world at a given level of final output. This is true, albeit offset by those cases – typically where ‘waste heat’ isn’t actually waste – which require more electrical than fossil energy, for example in fertilizer, steel, concrete and plastic manufacture. Most of the basic industrial infrastructure of modern life, in other words. Anyway, it may be the case that we could transition to a lower (electrical) energy supply for the same level of output. But first we do actually need to have a transition.

Breaking down the figures further into the richer and poorer parts of the word, let’s take the thirty-eight OECD countries plus Russia and China to be the richer or more ‘developed’ countries. These countries together account for 36 percent of the world’s population, while using 67 percent of its fossil fuel supply, 91 percent of its nuclear supply, 67 percent of its hydro supply and 76 percent of its renewable supply.

The corollary of this is that the poorer countries, which host 64 percent of the global population, get the benefit of 31 percent of the global energy supply. And 91 percent of their supply is based on fossils.

There is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a sunny interpretation of this – inevitably, it’s the rich countries that have the luxury of transitioning first, but hopefully the poorer countries will eventually catch up. So, don’t give up on transition – it’s coming soon! Or soonish.

One problem with that narrative is that by and large the rich countries aren’t in fact transitioning. The USA is the worst offender in this regard, having added 1.68 exajoules of fossil energy to its supply in 2024-5 and only 0.16 to its renewables and hydro. Some other individual countries show a slight transitioning trend – like the UK, for example (-0.07 EJ fossils and +0.04 renewables/hydro). But they need to be doing a lot better than that to effect real transition. Meanwhile look at the pushback poor old Ed Milliband gets for his weird behaviour – eating bacon sandwiches oddly and aiming for net zero emissions.

Another problem with that narrative is that it assumes there’s some natural progression from rich country to poor country transition. I don’t see much reason to make that assumption. It’s clearly not the case when it comes to nuclear power, which is basically a rich country toy without wider applicability. If that wasn’t obvious before the Iran war, it surely is now. Another fly in the nuclear ointment is, ironically, the problem with outages due to extreme weather, not to mention longer term ones like sea level rise.

Talking of the Iran war, I guess next year we’ll see a downturn in fossils because of it. The interesting thing is that in theory this is more a fossils-specific downturn than a general economic one, potentially offering a chance for renewables to step up. Although no doubt the general economic effects will create too much noise to determine the consequences in the figures. The bigger question is what happens to fossils supply when (if?) the war is over.

Anyway, in contrast to nuclear, renewables could in theory be more easily rolled out to poorer countries, but by and large that’s not happening – or at least not as fast as in the richer countries. India is the exception, losing 0.08 exajoules of fossil fuel supplies from 2024-25 and adding 0.29 exajoules of renewables. The rest of the poorer countries added 2.5 exajoules of fossil fuels and only 0.39 exajoules of renewables.

There are various reasons for this. The prohibitive cost of raising upfront finance for renewables in the poorer countries relative to the richer ones seems to be a major one. The unwillingness of the poorer countries to attempt transition in the face of the richer countries’ failure to do so is another. It’s hard to see the dial shifting on that 91 percent without major direct support for transition from the rich countries to the poor countries, and that’s not happening.

All in all, things are starting to feel warmer outside the human handcart as we trundle downhill – and not in a good way.