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The energy investment landscape has changed profoundly over the last decade.

Back in 2015, fossil fuels dominated the picture, amassing 30% more investments than electricity generation, grids and storage, according to the latest investment report from the International Energy Agency.

Now that ratio is reversing. The IEA expects investment in the electricity sector this year to be 50% higher than the total spent to bring oil, natural gas and coal to market. Meanwhile, investments in electric vehicles are soaring, with China way on top. 

Globally, total investments in the energy sector rose to $3.3 trillion in 2024, 2% higher than the previous year.

It’s unclear how vast an impact President Donald Trump’s election in the United States — and subsequent clawing back of climate incentives — could have on these global trends.

In its first World Energy Investment report published 10 years ago, the IEA noted two budding trends: low-carbon sources of electricity were starting to take off and China had edged out the long-dominant U.S. as the world’s largest energy investor. 

A decade later, those two trends have come together: China is now by far the largest energy investor globally, with its share of investment in clean energy worldwide expanding from a quarter a decade ago to almost a third today, the IEA notes. 

Last year, Chinese battery maker CATL and electric vehicle leader BYD cracked the top 20 in global energy research and development spending for the first time.

Despite all the clean energy gains, China and India continued to pour investments into coal, expected to be up 4% this year over last (a slight deceleration from the 6% average pace over the last five years). Investments into natural gas — especially into plants that turn it into shippable liquified natural gas — grew strongly in 2024, while exports from the U.S. are poised to double over the next several years.  

Upstream investments in oil — searching for new reserves and exploiting them, as well as maintaining production at existing wells — are expected to fall 6% this year. That would be the largest decline since 2016, and the first turn downward since 2020, when the Covid pandemic shut down the global economy. 

Meanwhile, another metric worsened sharply from a decade ago: Investment in expanding electricity access in low-income countries, where it is critically needed, fell by a third. A continent with 20% of the world’s population now accounts for only 2% of all clean energy investment globally, the IEA said.