Originally published February 17, 2016. Updated September 3, 2026.
Clean energy investment hit $2.2 trillion worldwide in 2025, almost twice the $1.1 trillion spent on fossil fuels that same year, according to the International Energy Agency. BloombergNEF counts a different set of technologies and arrives at $2.3 trillion for what it calls energy transition investment. Both totals are accurate. They measure different things, and mixing them into one bigger number would be wrong.
The world put $2.2 trillion into clean energy last year
Total global energy investment reached $3.3 trillion in 2025, and clean energy made up two-thirds of it. It’s the second year running that clean energy has out-invested fossil fuels worldwide, per the IEA. Electricity investment, the power plants and grids that generate and move electricity, pulled in $1.5 trillion in 2025, 50% higher than combined fossil fuel investment.
BloombergNEF’s $2.3 trillion figure grew 8% from 2024. Part of the gap between the two trackers is electric vehicles. BNEF’s total folds in $893 billion in electrified transport investment, up 21% year over year, a category the IEA’s energy framework doesn’t size the same way. Neither total is a substitute for the other.
Solar takes the biggest share, but grids and batteries are catching up
Solar is the single largest line item in the IEA’s entire $3.3 trillion tally, $450 billion in 2025, more than any other technology or fuel. If you’ve followed how fast solar capacity has grown or what’s happening with wind power, that won’t surprise you. What’s less obvious is how much of the rest of the money bypasses power plants entirely.
Grids and nuclear show the clearest split between the two trackers.
| Category | IEA (2025) | BNEF (2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Power grids | $400 billion | $483 billion |
| Nuclear | $70 billion | $36 billion |
Source: IEA, World Energy Investment 2025 and BNEF, Energy Transition Investment Trends 2026. The two columns measure the same categories with different boundaries, so read them as separate estimates.
The scope differences show up close to home too. US distributed solar and battery storage spending hit $12 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 128% from the prior quarter and a record. Battery installations topped new solar installations for a second straight quarter, per the same tracker.
China spends the most, and its renewables total fell for the first time since 2013
China drew almost a third of the world’s clean energy investment in 2025, up from a quarter ten years earlier, per the IEA. In dollar terms, BNEF put China’s total energy-transition spending at $800 billion in 2025.
That scale would have been hard to size a decade ago. A 2016 analysis by Cian O’Donovan, then a researcher with the University of Sussex’s Sussex Energy Group, argued that renewable-energy investment figures understated reality partly because major state financiers such as the China Development Bank were too hard to track. A decade later, BNEF puts a dollar figure on China’s spending down to the billion.
The scale comes with a wrinkle. BNEF recorded China’s first decline in renewable-specific investment since 2013 in 2025, even as its overall energy-transition total kept climbing. Renewable-energy investment fell worldwide too, $690 billion, down 9.5% year over year. A rising total and a falling renewables slice can both be true at once when enough of the growth comes from elsewhere, in this case electric vehicles and grids.
The US pulled back on clean energy funding after last year’s tax law
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the 2025 US tax law, rolled back most federal clean-energy tax credits and manufacturing incentives, and the effects are already in the data. US clean-energy manufacturing investment fell 24% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, to $8 billion. Total US clean-energy and transportation investment hit $75 billion that same quarter, up 22% from the prior quarter and the second-highest quarter on record, driven by consumer and retail demand, not new factory construction.
Rhodium Group has also modeled how much future investment the law puts at risk, $522 billion in announced clean-energy investment, cumulative from mid-2022 through the first quarter of 2025. That’s a projection of what could still unravel, separate from the manufacturing decline already showing up in the data above. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office now operates as the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
Cleantech venture capital keeps shrinking, but public markets are picking up the slack
If you’re trying to figure out whether venture capital for climate startups is growing or shrinking, both answers are true depending on which door you count. Climate-tech equity, combining early-stage and growth funding with public-market listings and secondary offerings, hit $77.3 billion in 2025. Pure early-stage venture funding, on its own, fell for a third straight year. Public listings and secondary share sales did more of the lifting than new venture rounds.
Crowdfunding platforms for clean-energy startups aren’t one of the categories inside that $77.3 billion. BNEF splits the total into two buckets instead, private funding through venture and growth investors, and public markets through listings and secondary offerings.
Green bonds passed $8 trillion, with one question still unanswered
Cumulative global green and sustainability-linked bond issuance passed $8.1 trillion by the end of 2025, including $6.8 trillion that met the Climate Bonds Initiative’s own alignment criteria for how the money gets used. That market barely existed at meaningful scale a decade ago, back when the 2016 analysis above was still framing clean-energy finance as a question of venture capital and bank lending.
If you came here wondering whether institutions like the World Bank are still funding fossil fuel projects alongside clean ones, and in what proportion, that’s a fair question with no clean 2026 answer yet. A breakdown specific enough to cite hasn’t turned up. The green bond total above is the clearest public-finance number available on that side of clean-energy money right now.
What would change this picture from here
The clearest trend to watch is the one already moving. US clean-energy manufacturing investment is already falling, and if that continues through the next few Clean Investment Monitor updates, it starts closing in on the amount Rhodium projects the 2025 tax law puts at risk. If manufacturing spending stabilizes instead, on the back of the same consumer and retail demand carrying the rest of US clean-energy spending, the tax law’s damage may turn out narrower than the model suggests.
The other trend worth watching sits in China. Renewable-specific investment there fell for the first time in over a decade even as the country’s total energy-transition spending kept climbing. Whether that gap closes or widens next year will show whether the pullback was a one-year blip or the start of a longer slide, separate from China’s continued growth in EVs and grid spending.
