Global Energy Transition Investment Grew in 2025 Despite Major Obstacles; Here Are the Numbers

Clean transportation led the way while renewable energy spending decreased.

Global investment in the energy transition rose to $2.3 trillion last year, an 8 percent increase from the prior year, demonstrating resilience amid policy changes in the United States and China.

This figure, from the new edition of an annual report from BloombergNEF, provides encouraging signs of the clean energy economy’s ability to overcome obstacles. But this is somewhat offset by the view, held by many climate scientists and economists, that investment needs to grow much faster for the world to avoid severe costs related to climate change.

Electrified transportation was the largest category of global investment, with $893 billion, a 21 percent increase. Next was renewable energy, with $690 billion, a 9.5 percent decrease.

U.S. investment in the energy transition was $378 billion, a 3.5 percent increase, according to the report.

The growth in the United States came mainly from investments in the electricity grid and electrified transportation, which was enough to offset a small decrease in spending on renewable energy, said Trina White, an analyst for BloombergNEF, a research firm.

The closest precedent for 2025 in terms of U.S. investment was 2017, which was also the first year of a Trump term in the White House, she said.

But there are some key differences. The biggest one, she said, is that energy transition technologies and businesses are more mature and less dependent on subsidies than they were in 2017.

Also, U.S. investment decreased in 2017 compared to the prior year, as opposed to 2025 when there was a small increase.

“It’s not necessarily shocking that there’s greater resilience now than there was then,” she said.

The report tracks funding for technology and infrastructure that support a transition to net-zero emissions, along with additional data on spending on clean energy supply chains and buying stock and issuing debt related to the energy transition.

One thing I look for in the report is how investment in clean energy resources compares with an estimate of the equivalent figure for fossil fuel resources. In 2025, spending on clean energy supply totaled $1.293 trillion, which exceeded the $1.191 trillion spent on fossil fuel supply.

This framing covers the supply side for clean energy and fossil fuels, but doesn’t include investment in vehicles or uses of energy beyond production or delivery. The goal, White said, is to provide a near apples-to-apples comparison of clean energy and fossil fuels.

China led the world in energy transition investment with $800 billion, down 4 percent from the prior year. The decrease was primarily due to government-imposed reforms in renewable energy that aimed to expand the use of competitive markets, the report said.

China’s total was more than double that of the runner-up, which was the United States, and Germany ranked a distant third.

I spoke with two researchers who were not involved with the report to get a sense of what they see in the findings.

Gernot Wagner, an economist at Columbia Business School, said an increase in investment shows that the energy transition has gained enough momentum to ram through policy obstacles.

“We are in a world where the underlying technological forces and the economic forces point in one and only one direction,” he said. “While the political pendulum swings back and forth, especially in this country, there is very little doubt that we are, in fact, racing in the right direction at an increasing speed.”

Wagner’s greatest concern is that the growth isn’t significant enough to effectively respond to climate change.

He co-wrote an article in September that touched on similar trends, finding that the energy transition has momentum that makes it a near-certainty that the world will decarbonize by about 2100. Decarbonization is a good thing, but an extended timetable would be disastrous, leading to trillions of dollars in avoidable costs tied to warming.

So, while $2.3 trillion is a lot, annual investment needs to be double that much or more, he said.

Femke Nijsse, deputy director of Exeter Climate Policy at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, summed up the report’s findings as “moderately positive.”

Her main critique is that BloombergNEF’s analysis doesn’t include key decarbonization factors, such as investment in walking infrastructure, public transportation and other measures that can help lower demand for fossil fuels.

But she acknowledged that this spending is difficult to estimate, which is why it’s often not included in a financial analysis.

I asked her if she was surprised that electrified transportation has grown to the point that its investment far exceeds that of renewable energy. She said this was expected and shows the EV market has reached a positive tipping point.

“The price of electric vehicles for the last five years, over the lifetime of a vehicle, has been cheaper, but most consumers care more about upfront costs, and we’ve seen that tipping point in upfront costs in quite a few regions now as well,” she said.

EVs have become affordable enough in much of the world that market share is growing even in countries, such as Brazil, without significant consumer subsidies, she said.

I’m going to take some comfort in the resilience of the energy transition. It’s also true that investment is not nearly large enough, but, especially at such a chaotic time for geopolitics, moderate progress will have to do.

Cover photo:  Workers produce new energy vehicle batteries on the production line of Huating New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. in Liuzhou, Guangxi, China, on September 8, 2025. Credit: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images