World Energy Investment 2015-2025, by Energy Type, read it, and if you don't weep, you should.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) issues data on the world energy supply in both data and in soothsaying forms. In my tenure here, I frequently produce tables from the annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) published each November, reflecting energy consumption from the previous year. The most recent WEO was published in November 2025, giving data for 2024.
Here, from the most recent edition, are the figures, in Exajoules, for the primary energy produced from each energy source in the most recent edition World Energy Outlook 2025:
cf Page 420.
The IEA has upgraded, over recent years, its reporting on the costs, money "invested" in all forms of energy.
It can be accessed here:
World Energy Investment 2025 Datafile
Free registration is required, whereupon access to the files are free to download.
Recently I was asked, in another forum, why I despise so called "renewable energy" and why I claim that the money squandered on it has had no effect on the accelerating degradation of the planetary atmosphere. I did not respond there, but I am demonstrating for anyone not involved in cult thinking, here just how obscene this all is, with respect to costs:
For convenience, I have downloaded the file, and added calculations, comparing the costs of every form of energy, between 2015-2025 to expenditures on so called "renewable energy," which the tables reproduced above demonstrate are trivial, to the point of useless, forms of energy, solar and wind combined, producing just 18 EJ out of 654 EJ consumed in 2024.
In the tables below, the orange background cells are my calculations, using normal, simple (division) calculations of every energy expenditure by type in that period. All other cells are reproduced directly from the data that can be accessed, with registration, at the IEA website.
Here it is, the figures are in billions of US dollars:
I contend, and it strikes me as pretty fucking obvious, that enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" has nothing to do at all with the preeminent environmental issue of our time, and in fact of any time in history, the collapse of the planetary atmosphere. The sole reason for squandering 5.689 trillion dollars on unsustainable, environmentally odious so called "renewable energy" was to attack the last best hope of the human race, nuclear energy.
By the way, in the old days, before the squandering annually of hundreds of billions of dollars on so called "renewable energy" each year became a world wide practice, the handwaving antinukes around here used to claim that if we spent the money we spent on nuclear energy on renewable energy, an energy nirvana would break out.
Well here we are.
The kind of muttering assholes who come here to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen," and scream nonsensically "RADIOACTIVITY" - this from a prism of ignorance of physics, chemistry, radiobiology, general biology, mathematics, geology, and riparian studies and in fact all other sciences - in hopes of scaring the uneducated into accepting the deaths of millions of people each year from dangerous fossil fuels, also claim in all permutations of the type, antinukes, and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes, that nuclear energy is "too expensive."
Obviously they do not consider the complete collapse of the planetary atmosphere, and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the first quarter of this century from fossil fuel waste, air pollution, and, at a rising rate, extreme weather including but not limited to extreme heat, "too expensive."
Their rationale for this, having worked their entire lives in the sad embrace of extreme ignorance leading to extreme disaster, to destroy nuclear infrastructure in the Western developed world, is to point to the Vogtle reactors which cost $15 billion dollars each to build, although they will be serving humanity until the dawn of the 22nd century. As it happens, the cost of these reactors was not evenly distributed between the two, Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4. Unit three consumed 70% of the $30 billion total, unit four, 30%, because the lessons learned on unit three were applied to reducing costs on unit four.
But let's assume that the vandalism of nuclear manufacturing infrastructure put forth by fossil fuel promoting ignoramuses advocating destruction of the planetary atmosphere out of vague insipid fears of a few radioactive atoms in the fucking Hudson River holds for ever, and that the construction of nuclear reactors cost $15 billion each.
In this case, for 5.689 trillion dollars, by simple division, 379 new nuclear reactors could have been built and served humanity, as the Vogtle reactors will, for the balance of this century.
Nuclear power provided, by the table from the 2025 WEO, 31 Exajoules of primary energy in 2024. There are now 438 nuclear reactors operating in the world. The nation with the largest number of them is still, temporarily, the United States, with 94 operating, 92 of which were built in the 20th century and serve humanity right up to this day. Several closed nuclear reactors are being refurbished and rebuilt. The ratio between 379 and 438 is 0.865. This ratio, multiplied by 31 Exajoules gives is roughly 28 Exajoules, ten more Exajoules than all the world's useless solar and wind junk produced while consuming the majority of the 5.689 trillion dollars listed above. Also, it is incumbent to note the costs of grid connections. In California - one can look this up - the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant produces more electricity every year on a 12 acre footprint than all of the wind turbines in that benighted State, spread over more than 1000 square miles of industrialized former wilderness. The grid connection, like the cost of redundancy, are hidden costs of so called "renewable energy" which in Orwellian doublespeak is described - an outright lie - as being "cheap."
(If it's so cheap, why are countries still investing in gas and coal plants?)
I note that within 25 years, practically every solar cell and wind turbine on the planet will be landfill; the Vogtle reactors will still be running at better than 90% capacity utilization.
But do nuclear plants have to cost $15 billion each? Vogtle 4 suggests this is not so, but there is a better case, that repeating the successful program of nuclear plant building in the United States between 1965 and 1985, and France in the 1970s through the 1980s. It's China. China has built 61 nuclear reactors and has 39 under construction at this time. If, in China, nuclear reactors were to cost 15 billion dollars each, the investment would represent 1.5 trillion dollars, three times the figure for the investment in nuclear energy given in the EIA table above.
Neither the United States in the 20th century, nor France in that century, nor China in this century, required $15 billion dollars per reactor. There is a reason for the high cost of building Vogtle 3, and the reason is the willful destruction of the infrastructure for building nuclear facilities executed by the set of people who have no interest, none, with addressing fossil fuels, but are only interested in tearing the shit out of the planet with mines, even on the sea floors, industrializing vast stretches of wilderness, and leaving vast debris fields of rotting energy junk for all future generations because they hate nuclear energy, our last best hope, out of ignorant dogma they cannot set aside with a modicum of education.
Oh, and yes, and besides the vast debris fields left by so called "renewable energy" we'll leave future generations a destroyed planetary atmosphere: New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 431.73 ppm.
No sense of decency, none.
If I sound angry, it may be a function of the fact that I am.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Have a nice weekend.
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