Climate advocates for years have been promising a “clean energy transition” was just on the horizon. The globe has spent $10 trillion in the past decade on the effort, and that was backed up by government mandates. 

Despite all that support, an annual benchmark report shows yet again that coal, oil and natural gas continue to dominate the global energy picture. 

The 2026 “Statistical Review of World Energy” finds that 86.3% of primary energy consumption was derived from fossil fuels last year. This is down from 86.6% the previous year. 

Driven by subsidies and government mandates, wind and solar energy saw the greatest year-over-year growth, according to the report, with solar accounting for 71% of the increase in renewable energy from 2024. 

The report is considered a benchmark source for data on energy trends around the globe. It was originally produced by BP, but in 2022, the British energy company passed off the task to the Energy Institute, a United Kingdom-based energy nonprofit that advocates for a transition away from fossil fuels.  

Centuries to net-zero

This year, the institute partnered with Ember, a think tank that advocates for the wind and solar industry. The lead authors’ statements in the report’s foreword reflect the authors’ commitment to net-zero emissions, focusing on increases in renewable energy while downplaying the lack of any evidence of a transition away from fossil fuels. 

“The 75 years of energy history documented in this Review have largely been a fossil-powered growth story," Phil MacDonald, Ember CEO, said in his forward foreword. 

"Today, the data show that supply growth is increasingly renewable and electric. Electricity continues to outpace total energy supply growth, particularly in Asia. For the first time, renewables – driven largely by solar – were the largest source of new energy supply.” 

Nuclear, hydroelectric and other carbon-free generation technologies reached their highest level ever in 2025. Their share of the global energy picture stood at 14% in 2025, climbing steadily over the past decade. 

However, as Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., a climate researcher and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, points out in his “The Honest Broker” Substack, the figures shouldn’t get net-zero emissions proponents too fired up. 

With respect to climate policies, the pace of change is agonizingly slow. Based on the growth in the past 10 years, Pielke wrote, it would take centuries to reach net-zero. 

Coal is still king

The report finds that people are using more energy than ever, which is a sign that they are getting wealthier. 

The globe’s total energy supply in 2025 was over 600 exajoules, a measurement of energy used for extremely large numbers, which was an increase of 1.7% over the previous year. 

Global oil consumption increased by 1.3% in 2025, a higher rate than the 1.1% increase seen in 2024. Alongside this increase in hydrocarbon consumption was an increase in emissions of 1.1%, a third of which was from the U.S. 

Coal was the largest source of global energy, taking up nearly one-third of the total, a decrease from the 33.7% in 2024. Natural gas was the next largest source of energy at 21.9%, and hydroelectric accounted for just under 14% last year. 

Pielke explains that to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 – a goal established by the 2015 Paris Agreement which has informed many nations’ climate policies – the world would need to retire 21 exajoules of energy from fossil fuels every single year. 

To replace that lost reliable energy, Pielke wrote, the world would need to build the equivalent of one 1.75-gigawatt nuclear power plant every day from now until 2050. To make up the lost energy with wind farms would require building 2,000 turbines every day for the next 25 years. 

“Net-zero 2050 is infeasible, by any practical standard, but that does not mean that the aspiration of net-zero is impossible,” he wrote.

Wind, solar and batteries

Global solar power rose by 30% in 2025 over the previous year, and its share of total generation reached 8.7%, which surpassed wind, at 8.4%. Solar’s share nearly matches nuclear power’s share at 8.8%. 

The “World Energy” report also notes that battery storage capacity grew by 66% in 2025, exceeding that of the generation types. However, as the Institute for Energy Research notes in its analysis of the report, battery storage isn’t a generation type. 

“It stores excess energy generated by other sources for later use, particularly when wind and solar power are in a lull. Batteries are thus a necessary additional expense due to the intermittency of wind and solar generation,” the IER wrote. 

While the report shows that subsidies and government mandates are producing large increases in the share of wind and solar, providing plenty of highlights for advocates of net-zero, the report also shows that the globe’s primary source of energy is fossil fuels, and net-zero won’t likely be seen for many decades to come.