In his new book, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz marshals a vast array of data to make a startling case: that despite the widespread view that we are in an ‘energy transition’, we appear to be consuming more supposedly obsolete energy sources than ever before.

Far from displacing fossil fuels, even while renewable energy is expanding, so too is fossil fuel consumption. Oil, gas and coal are at record levels of production – and so too is the most supposedly obsolete pre-industrial energy sources of all, wood. How is this possible when renewable energy is also expanding at record levels?

Fressoz’s work is an important contribution to our understanding of energy, and he demonstrates convincingly that on a global scale the story of energy has overall been one of continuous, exponential growth. But he makes critical omissions – he overlooks the implications of major regional and national variations in the way fossil fuel demand is collapsing amidst renewable expansion, and fails to recognise the new breakthrough system possibilities to end extractivism that emerge due to renewables.

Transition? What Transition?

Part of the problem is that Fressoz conflates the long ‘additive energy’ history of industrial paradigm energy transitions with the totally distinctive dynamics of renewable technologies. As we’ll show here, when we look more deeply, we can identify new dynamics under renewables that illustrate a break with past patterns both in terms of energy and materials, as well as in terms of related structures of economic organisation.

On his part, Fressoz’s conclusion is that the green transition simply isn’t happening. “Innovation has never made a resource obsolete” blare marketing slogans about the book. The upshot of Fressoz’s argument is that renewable energy innovation is not a viable route to reducing carbon emissions to tackle the climate crisis. And more broadly, that energy innovation has not altered the fundamental dynamics of energy production as a system of endless material extraction.

Fressoz’s work is a valuable contribution that upends false assumptions about energy innovation. But it suffers from critical gaps related to how technology disruptions work, what they mean, and how renewable technologies create the possibility of a fundamental break with the extractivist system of energy production that has defined most of humanity’s history.

Unfortunately, Fressoz’s work has received little meaningful analysis from a systems science approach. Having received rave reviews from publications like The Economist and Financial Times, he has also been platformed and celebrated by popular podcasters in the environment space like Nate Hagens and Rachel Donald, neither of whom offered any critical scrutiny of his approach.

But Fressoz’s work contains a range of major fault lines which are fatal for his overarching narrative.

Firstly, while Fressoz’s global aggregate approach to telling the story of ‘additive energy’ gives us important insights, it fudges national and regional disparities in this story which complicate his narrative. When we zoom in closer we find that actually there are countries which have used new energy technologies to displace and phase out previous resources. Innovation has led to resources becoming effectively obsolete in specific cases. The key, then, is to identify how this has happened in these cases, so that it can be applied where it’s not happening. Ironically, he uses the ‘global’ to deny the ‘local’.

Secondly, while Fressoz’s insights about energy certainly challenge prevailing lazy assumptions about energy innovations, the additive nature of energy is not really as groundbreaking a position as assumed given that renowned energy scientist Vaclav Smil (whom I’ve critiqued extensively) has pretty much articulated the same points for decades. Fressoz is also unaware that this phenomenon has been fully acknowledged within a broader technology disruption framework which recognises precisely that energy technologies over the last millennia have compounded extraction (and therefore, yes, increased the capability to extract more energy from a wider range of scarce material resources) rather than simply doing away with them. This, for instance, is precisely the argument put forward by technology forecasters Tony Seba and James Arbib, who categorise this as a historical epoch, the ‘Age of Extraction’.

Thirdly, when we zoom in, we can see that renewable energy technologies are displacing and phasing out fossil fuel resources in particular countries and regions, demonstrating that energy displacement is real. This is good news, because it means that phasing out fossil fuel resources is possible, but needs the right approach.

Fourthly, Fressoz ignores key attributes of renewable energy as a distinctive new technology stack that in itself is fundamentally different to all types of previous extraction-based energy systems. Understanding this distinction helps us recognise how we can leverage and design renewable energy systems to kill the age of endless extraction, facilitating the emergence of a new type of economy. In this process, energy and economic transformation need to happen simultaneously.

Fifthly, and relatedly, by being ‘energy blind’ to the unique system properties of renewables, Fressoz cannot recognise that there is no such thing as a shift to renewables without a fundamental shift in the economics of all material production and consumption.

Energy Transitions in the Age of Extraction

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues that the “energy transition” is basically an illusion – that humanity never truly replaces old energy sources but only adds new ones on top of them. In his view, wood, coal, oil, and now renewables form “ongoing and symbiotic” additions rather than substitutions, and thus the push for a green transition is a myth.

Fressoz hits on an important issue: the reason this process did not lead those energy sources to becoming obsolete in absolute terms is because these new technologies represented more efficient ways of extracting energy directly from mineral resources. They were additive precisely because they reinforced the system of extraction, and that was the entire point of the innovation. This is why, while the older energy source declined relative to the new source enabled by new technology, this ultimately enabled the accelerated extraction of energy and materials overall.

Importantly all these major shifts occurred under capitalism – a relation of production in which people are dispossessed from the systems of production which are monopoly controlled by capitalist owners of these systems. This creates the dynamic of endless growth: in order to compete and survive in the capitalist marketplace, enterprises must accumulate profits by suppressing wages of the workforce or investing in the improvement of technologies of production. Competition between capitalists thus drives accelerating efforts to maximise profits through these mechanisms, resulting in intensified extraction of energy and materials.

Wood: How Aggregate Figures Mask Real Local Phase Outs

At the same time, however, this process did result in significant displacement of previous energy sources especially in particular nations and regions.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is from Fressoz’s most powerful example: the use of fuel for wood. On a global scale, the data indeed shows that new energy sources have largely added onto old ones rather than completely replacing them. The world as a whole never stopped burning wood for energy, even as it embraced coal, oil, gas, and now renewables. By this ‘global’ measure, Fressoz is correct – traditional biomass never vanished. The “grand energy transition” narrative (wood → coal → oil → gas → renewables) is too neat, since in reality all those sources co-exist today in higher absolute quantities than before. The declining percentage share of wood, Fressoz shows, masked a ‘hidden’ growth in absolute wood consumption fueled by population increase and new uses (e.g. modern bioenergy, charcoal for growing cities, etc.).

And this is where Fressoz falls short. Because he fails to acknowledge the implications of the fact that this growth is not uniform across the globe at all, but is concentrated in specific regions. The aggregate figures thus mask the real absolute declines in wood fuel use in some regions as compared to the rise in others. Which means that oil and wood fuel growth are not symbiotically entwined at all.

Many industrialised countries largely phased out wood as a primary fuel during the 20th century. For example, in the United States wood supplied over 90% of US energy in 1850. But the Industrial Revolution sparked a coal boom. In the United States, coal quickly toppled wood as the primary fuel: between 1850 and 1895, wood’s share of US energy plummeted from about 90% to 30%, while coal’s share surged from 9% to 65%. This fell to just 3% by the mid-20th century as coal, oil, and gas took over. This was a real absolute decline.

A similar shift happened in Europe: by the early 1900s, coal had almost entirely replaced firewood for industrial and heating needs in countries like the UK and Germany. Access to cheap coal, and later oil and gas, enabled a rapid decline in wood use. By the 1950s, wood’s share of primary energy in most Western economies was negligible (often under 5%). Households transitioned to kerosene, gas, and electric heating, and industries stopped using wood except in niche applications.

China also presents a dramatic case of wood fuel phase out: in the 1980s, biomass (wood and crop waste) was a major rural energy source in China, but rapid electrification and coal/LPG adoption led to a steep decline thereafter. Quantitative evidence shows Eastern Asia’s household wood fuel emissions fell by 60% from 1990 to 2019, reflecting how China and its neighbours moved away from wood fuel. By the 2010s, China’s reliance on wood for cooking was virtually eliminated, with over 80–90% of its population using modern fuels.

These were all absolute declines, demonstrating that displacement of traditional fuels by modern energy sources has been both feasible and observable given the right conditions.

So what’s keeping wood fuel consumption growing at an ‘aggregate’ level? Many developing regions never underwent a complete wood-to-fossil fuel transition and remain heavily dependent on biomass. Sub-Saharan Africa stands out: about two-thirds of all households in Africa rely on wood fuel, and wood energy comprises roughly 27% of Africa’s primary energy supply. Some three quarters of global wood fuel demand is from Africa and Asia. In several African countries, firewood and charcoal provide over 90% of household energy​, especially for cooking and heating. This reliance has grown in absolute terms. From 1990 to 2019, wood fuel use in sub-Saharan Africa nearly doubled (as reflected in CO₂ emissions from wood burning)​, driven by rapid population growth and limited access to alternatives. Africa today harvests about 38% of global wood fuel (the largest regional share) and also produces over 60% of the world’s charcoal​ – a sign of persistent dependence in both rural and urban areas.

This has translated into different levels of emissions linked to wood fuels. As one paper in Earth System Science Data notes, “the emission increases were largely fuelled by countries in sub-Saharan Africa, southern Asia, and Latin America, whereas significant decreases were seen in countries in eastern Asia and South-East Asia.”

Despite the absolute declines for wood fuel in North America and Europe, we’ve seen a recent comeback particular in Europe as ‘net zero’ targets have permitted use of wood pellets as supposedly cleaner alternatives to oil, gas and coal. This demonstrates three issues: firstly that technological disruption can and has significantly displaced previous resources due to economic competitiveness; secondly where newer technologies and resources are not available, poorer countries find they are still dependent on the older resources; thirdly economic pressures and incentives can erase progress, so we need sound policy decisions to avoid this.

But Fressoz’s narrative of a ‘global’ phenomenon is clearly misleading. Entire continents (Europe, North America) underwent a genuine shift from wood-based energy to fossil fuel and electric energy in the 19th–20th centuries. Dozens of countries have achieved what energy transitions away from wood fuel in their domestic sector. More recently, countries like China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Thailand have transitioned tens of millions of households from wood fuel to gas and electricity in a span of a few decades – a remarkable shift in energy use patterns in a short time period.

We can see similar evidence of real phase outs at local and regional levels across the other key historical energy transitions.

From Coal to Oil and Gas (20th Century): In the early–mid 20th century, the rise of petroleum (oil) and natural gas dramatically displaced the incumbent (coal). In the US, oil and gas went from niche fuels (9% of energy in 1910) to the majority by the 1950s, while coal’s share collapsed from 77% to 28% in that period. In that short time-period this was an absolute decline.

The Nuclear Introduction (Mid/Late 20th Century): The deployment of nuclear power in the 1960s-1980s provides a clear case of a new energy technology displacing older fuels in a specific sector (electricity). For example, France responded to the 1970s oil shocks by aggressively building nuclear plants. In little over a decade, France went from heavily oil-dependent electricity to 80% nuclear plus hydro, effectively eliminating oil and coal from its power generation mix. By the 1990s, French electricity sector emissions had plunged, and nuclear supplied the bulk of its power (75% by 1990). This rapid substitution illustrates that when a superior technology or policy push arrives, transitions can occur fast – undermining the idea that all energy change is necessarily just gradual accretion.

This leads us to two crucial insights. On the one hand, Fressoz is right that successful energy technology disruptions provided humanity the ability to intensify extraction not just of the new energy resource, but also of the previous resources which were being increasingly displaced. On the other hand, the global aggregate story obfuscates the reality that in many nations and sectors, the new energy technology did enable phase down and phase out of the previous energy systems.

Clean Energy’s Rise: Renewables Are Causing Fossil Fuel Decline

Where Fressoz’s work falls particularly flat is his focus on aggregate data relating to renewable energy and fossil fuels. This approach is deeply misleading because it conceals how renewables are rapidly displacing fossil fuels in major regions and sectors, and obscures what is driving the persistence of fossil fuels elsewhere.

United States: Wind and Solar Overtake Coal

The US power sector has undergone a dramatic shift in the last 15 years. Coal-fired electricity has collapsed, largely due to a surge of cleaner alternatives. Coal generation in the US peaked around 2007 and has since fallen by about two-thirds, a decline of over 1,300 terawatt-hours (TWh).

In 2024, coal fell below 15% of US electricity output for the first time on record. This was not because Americans used less electricity – total demand actually grew modestly – but because coal’s role was supplanted by other sources. The data shows exactly what replaced it: since 2007, US wind and solar generation increased by 722 TWh, and natural gas generation increased by 968 TWh, together compensating for the coal drop. In other words, renewables (and to some extent gas) filled the gap, not additional coal.

By 2024, wind and solar farms produced 17% of US electricity, edging out coal’s share (which fell to 14%) This milestone confirms a genuine transition: a decade ago, coal delivered around half of US power, and renewables (excluding hydro) were a sliver; now coal is a distant third behind gas and renewables. The outcome is an absolute decline in fossil fuel burning.

The retirement of hundreds of coal units was directly driven by competition from cheap wind, solar, and also cheap shale gas. While natural gas – another fossil fuel – picked up part of coal’s slack (raising some challenges for emissions), the renewable contribution has been huge, and growing. Wind and solar tripled in output from 2015 to 2024, and their continued build-out is projected to further cut into gas in coming years. Indeed, new wind and solar accounted for the majority of new US generation in 2022–2024, such that even total fossil fuel generation is now trending down. The US Energy Information Administration notes that in 2022, renewable electricity (including hydro) surpassed coal generation for the first time on an annual basis – a clear sign of displacement.

It’s worth highlighting regional examples within the US.

In Texas, a state famous for oil and gas, wind power has exploded over the past 15 years. Texas now leads the nation in wind generation, and wind alone has at times provided more electricity than coal in the state. In the first half of 2019, for instance, wind accounted for 22% of Texas’ electricity while coal fell to 21%, marking the first time wind overtook coal. By 2023, wind made up roughly 26% of Texas’s power – second only to natural gas and far above coal’s contribution. Several Texas coal plants shut down as wind (and cheap gas) undercut their economics. This refutes the “additive” idea: wind didn’t just add extra power on top of coal; it directly led to less coal being used.

In California, solar PV has become a dominant daytime power source, frequently supplying over half of midday electricity and causing gas-fired generators to ramp down or turn off in those hours. On many spring afternoons, solar plus wind meet virtually all of California’s demand, forcing fossil gas plants into minimal operation. By 2023, solar provided about 30% of California’s total electricity across the year and much more at peak times. This growth has materially reduced gas burn: during sunny hours, gas power plant output in California has been roughly cut in half compared to a decade ago, thanks to solar flooding the grid. In April 2024, California’s solar generation hit a record 15 GW at midday, slashing the need for gas (LNG) generation by 50% in high-demand hours. Excess solar is increasingly stored in batteries to displace evening gas as well. These trends show solar actually pushing out fossil fuel usage from the system, not simply augmenting it.

The US example demonstrates that as renewables scale up, they eat into the market share of the dirtiest fuels. Coal’s precipitous decline – now at its lowest output in decades in the US – is largely a story of replacement by newer sources. This is precisely what an energy “transition” looks like. And while gas has partly filled the gap (raising the importance of phasing gas down next), the simultaneous rise of wind and solar has ensured that total CO₂ emissions from US power generation fell 18% since 2015, even as demand edged upward.

Europe: Phasing Out Coal with Renewables

Europe provides even starker evidence of clean energy displacing fossils. Across the EU, absolute coal use has been in freefall in recent years, driven by policy commitments and the rapid expansion of wind and solar.

The data shows that renewables are not just adding capacity – they are actively driving coal (and even natural gas) out of the mix.

EU electricity from coal plants peaked in 2003 and has since fallen by 68%. This is a massive drop in absolute terms. In 2024, coal accounted for only 10% of the EU’s electricity, an all-time low. Many countries in Europe have seen coal virtually eradicated from power generation. For example, the UK has cut coal use in electricity by over 95% in just one decade (coal went from 40% of UK generation in 2012 to under 2% by 2022), thanks to a carbon price and growth in renewables and gas.

Smaller countries like Belgium and Sweden have already closed their last coal plants. The “coal phase out” is a centrepiece of Europe’s energy transition, and it is enabled by alternatives taking coal’s place.

In 2020, for the first time, renewables (wind, solar, hydro, biomass) generated more electricity in the EU than all fossil fuels combined. That trend has continued. By 2024, clean sources (including nuclear) provided 47% of EU electricity, whereas fossil fuels supplied only 29%.

Notably, wind and solar alone rose to 29% of generation in 2024, while coal and gas fell to a combined 26%. Solar output even overtook coal output in 2024 (11% vs 10%). Wind produced 17%, more than gas (16%). This inversion is clear evidence that the new sources are capturing market share from the old.

Germany, long Europe’s largest coal consumer, cut coal power by 54% from 2015 to 2023 as wind and solar surged (even as it also phased out nuclear). It plans to fully retire coal by 2030, with renewables filling the gap.

Spain reduced coal in electricity from 25% in 2007 to under 2% by 2022 after expanding wind and solar, importing French nuclear power. Perhaps most dramatically, France’s electricity has been 90% carbon-free for decades, primarily from nuclear (as noted), meaning oil and coal that once powered French grids in the 1960s were displaced.

In aggregate, 16 out of 17 EU countries that still used coal saw coal’s share decline further in 2024, with the fuel becoming “marginal or absent” in most of them. European coal demand is now mostly concentrated in just a couple of countries (Poland and Germany), and even there it is shrinking. This continental shift would be impossible if renewables were not actively substituting for coal.

China: Clean Energy Growth Slowing Fossil Expansion

China, the world’s largest energy consumer, is often cited as evidence against energy transition because it still builds both coal plants and solar farms at a staggering pace. It is true that China’s total energy and coal use are still rising (driven by economic and population growth). However, even in China we see clear signs of partial displacement: the dominance of coal in China’s power mix has been eroding, and a significant portion of new energy demand is met by renewables rather than fossil fuels.

China is installing wind and solar at world-record scales. Its wind and solar generation tripled from 2019 to 2024 (from 630 TWh to 1,826 TWh). Clean electricity (including hydro and nuclear) jumped such that over half of China’s incremental power demand since 2015 was met by clean sources.

This marks a major shift from earlier years when nearly all demand growth was met by coal. Coal’s share of China’s electricity has fallen from 70% in 2015 to about 58% in 2024. This is because despite coal generation increasing in absolute terms, it is supplying a smaller fraction of China’s needs because renewables are capturing the majority of new demand growth. The trend is bending toward a peak: in 2024, China’s increase in solar generation (over 250 TWh) was more than twice as large as its increase in coal generation. The International Energy Agency (IEA) now expects China’s coal consumption to plateau through 2027 – an unthinkable prospect if not for the clean energy boom.

It’s important to note that China’s situation is one of slowing addition rather than outright reduction – but even that signals future displacement. China is adding some coal capacity for grid stability and to meet surging demand, but those plants are running at low utilisation, as renewables and hydro take priority when available.

In 2022, intense heatwaves drove a power demand spike; even so, China’s coal power grew only 1.9%, less than one-third the increase seen in the previous year. Why? Because solar output alone in 2024 grew by 43%, far outpacing coal’s growth. Essentially, renewables are eating into the potential growth of coal – if wind and solar hadn’t expanded, coal would have risen much more to meet demand.

In some regions of China and during certain seasons, renewables already effectively displace fossil fuel generation. For example, China’s massive hydro dams and growing wind fleet mean that during wet or windy periods, coal plants temporarily reduce output (similar to what we see in Western grids). China has also begun replacing oil with electricity in transportation (it leads the world in electric vehicle adoption, with EVs now nearly half, 47.9%, of new car sales). Thus, even in the world’s largest coal-consuming nation, the dynamics of substitution are visible: coal’s dominance is eroding, and renewables are poised to curtail coal use in absolute terms once demand growth subsides.

In summary, across multiple major economies we see that renewable energy is far more than an “additional layer”. It is actively driving down the use of high-carbon fuels: US coal is in freefall, Europe’s fossil fuels are being pushed out of the power sector, and even in China fossil fuel growth is being capped by the renewables surge. The global picture reflects this as well. By 2022, wind and solar reached a record 12% of global electricity, and all clean sources (renewables plus nuclear) hit 39% – the highest ever. Consequently, the carbon intensity of world electricity fell to an all-time low in 2022.

By 2024, renewable generation provided a record 32% of global electricity while coal’s share dipped to 34% (down from 36% the year before). If these trends hold, global coal power output is expected to start falling, meaning wind and solar will not just accommodate new demand but also replace existing fossil fuel generation on an annual basis. This is the very definition of an energy transition in progress.

To be clear, the transition is not uniform or instantaneous – oil and gas remain significant, and some regions lag. But the evidence is overwhelming that we are seeing substitution, not just addition. Wherever renewable energy is scaling up, the curve of fossil fuel use bends downward. Had Fressoz’s premise been correct, we would not observe entire fuel industries declining or ending (as with coal in Britain or oil in French power plants). But we do see that – and increasingly so.

A Different Technology Stack: Why This Phase Transition Is Transformative

The ongoing clean energy transition is unprecedented – not because transitions never happened before, but because the nature of the technologies and systems involved is fundamentally different from past shifts.

Previous energy transitions through the Age of Extraction have served to compound and accelerate the intensity of extraction. Technological innovation enabled the expansion of the energy sector to new types of fuel premised on extraction from geographically confined areas.

But renewables are a different beast altogether. They are not premised on the flow of a particular scarce mineral fuel source, but instead enable the continuous harnessing of energy from a planetary commons of renewable sources. Unlike the switch from one fuel to another (say coal to oil), the switch to renewables is part of a wider socio-technological transformation: it changes the fundamentals of how energy is produced, distributed, and used in ways that enable new efficiencies and synergies. This makes the displacement of fossil fuels more feasible and, arguably, faster. Key components of this energy phase transition are as follows:

From Flow to Stock

In all previous energy systems, the production of energy depended directly on the continuous and every-increasing flow of materials from a scarce geographically concentrated stock of mineral resources. Renewable energy systems turn this entire approach on its head. A limited, rather than continuous, flow of materials is needed to create the initial stock of renewable energy technology (such as a solar and wind system with battery storage). Once constructed, this standing stock is able to harness continuous flows of abundant energy from renewable solar and wind sources without requiring any further material inputs. Renewables, in other words, function entirely differently to all previous energy systems. Once installed, they enable the continuous production of energy for free (at near zero marginal costs) without the need for continuous material inputs.

A System that Lasts Decades

As the technology has improved, the life-cycle of renewable technologies has increased. While many earlier panels are insured for about 25-30 years, solar panels and wind turbines are now able to last much longer. As solar panels with an official lifespan of 25 years, for instance, experience a small annual degradation rate of about 0.5-.08% a year (and probably smaller), they are not at all obsolete after 25 years but tend to continue operating at 90% capacity. More recent solar panels operate for between 30 and 40 years, and newer monocrystalline panels are expected to last up to 50 years. This means that once built, renewable systems can potentially last up to a half century. That’s a half century of zero marginal cost energy production without further material inputs during that period of operation.

The End of Mining?

Producing the first stock of renewable technologies will of course require large material inputs. Despite questionable research by basically one oil mining guy, Simon Michaux (who thinks the solution is small nuclear reactors), robust quantitative research using state-of-the-art methodologies by the Energy Transitions Commission, SystemIQ and others shows that there are sufficient minerals to support the global deployment of renewable energy technologies. Even so, this does not actually represent a net increase in mining, but a net decrease. That’s because the weight of the materials required for a renewable system as compared to a fossil fuel system is 300 times smaller. It’s also worth noting the disparity in waste.

Solar produces about 2 kg of solid waste per MWh over 25 years. Compare that to coal’s 90 kg of toxic ash plus nearly a tonne of CO₂ per MWh, and around 450 kg of CO₂ per MWh produced by gas. Not only does the renewable shift therefore entail a massive net reduction in mining as we shift to renewable energy systems, we now have the technology to recycle many of these materials and minerals at near 100% efficiency. For batteries, for instances, it’s possible to create a full circular economy enabling net zero mining, in which rather than needing to do further extensive new mining to find critical materials for batteries at the end of their usable lifespan, these materials can be recycled and replaced with negligible new materials inputs. Solar panels, made of materials like glass, aluminium and silicon can be almost fully recycled, and we can recycle up to 95% of wind turbine components. Fibreglass and carbon fibre blades are the most challenging to recycle, but new techniques like pyrolysis have been shown to enable recycling these materials into cement; and the creation of blades from plant-based resin offers a way to make blades that are far easier to recycle.

Flexible, Intelligent Power

Wind and solar are variable by nature (dependent on weather), which might seem like a disadvantage. But modern grid management and forecasting allow them to be integrated at large scale, complemented by other resources (hydro, storage, demand response). The need to balance intermittency has driven digitalisation and smarter grids. Advanced software, sensors, and AI now help utilities predict renewable output, adjust demand in real-time, and maintain stability with far less fossil fuel “backup” than previously thought. The result is a more flexible, optimised power system. The IEA notes that digital technologies greatly improve grid reliability and help integrate high shares of variable renewables. In effect, the grid itself is transforming into a flexible, data-driven platform – a stark contrast to the rigid, centralised fossil fuel grid of the past. This transition in grid technology means that renewables can replace fossil fuel generation without sacrificing reliability, thanks to better control and efficiency.

Distributed Generation

Another hallmark of this transition is the move from a few large power plants harnessing geographically concentrated mineral resources to many distributed energy resources. Solar panels on millions of rooftops, wind turbines spread across wide geographies, battery systems at neighbourhood and utility scale – energy is no longer produced only by giant centralised stations.

This distributed model increases resilience (many small sources instead of one big one that can fail) and empowers consumers to also be producers (“prosumers”). It also reduces transmission losses and can bring power access to remote areas without extensive fuel supply chains.

In rural Africa and South Asia, for example, solar home systems and microgrids are leapfrogging the need for diesel generators. Distributed renewables are directly displacing what would have been kerosene lighting or gasoline generator use. The cumulative effect is a more democratised energy system that erodes the market for fossil fuels even at the micro level. The new renewable system can create new possibilities for a new energy commons in which energy is not only owned and controlled by people, but intelligently shared across sectors, regions and borders.

Electrification of End-Uses

Perhaps the biggest game-changer is that the clean energy transition is tied to electrification of sectors previously dominated by fossil fuels – notably transportation (oil for cars and trucks) and heating (gas and coal for heat). Electric vehicles and heat pumps are surging in adoption. Why does this matter? Because it means we are not simply swapping one fuel (coal) for another fuel (gas) in the power sector; we are converting entire devices and infrastructures to run on electricity, which can then be supplied by renewables.

This is a two-step displacement: first oil is replaced by an EV battery, then the electricity for that battery is generated by renewables instead of coal/gas. The efficiency gains are huge – for example, an electric car uses 60–80% of its input energy for motion, whereas a gasoline car uses only 20% (the rest wasted as heat). So electrification inherently reduces energy waste and overall energy demand for the same service. This applies across all other sectors.

Fossil fuels lose just under 70% of energy as waste heat in the process of converting to electricity. Electrification removes this loss, meaning that renewable systems can enable a colossal global reduction in final energy demand of up to around 40%. A rapid route to demand reduction, in other words, is shifting to renewables.

Rapid Innovation and Cost Declines

Wind turbines, solar panels, lithium batteries, and related renewable technologies have a unique economic feature that makes them totally different to traditional fuel sources: they are on steep learning curves. The more we manufacture and deploy them, the cheaper and better they get, thanks to economies of scale and technological improvements. This is akin to the electronics or semiconductor industry, rather than the extractive model of fossil fuels.

Over the past decade, the cost of solar PV electricity fell by 85%, and wind power by 55%. Since 2008 alone, costs for solar, wind, and battery storage dropped by more than 50%. This has made renewables the least expensive source of new power in most countries, undercutting even existing fossil fuel plants in cost. Cheap clean energy accelerates adoption, which further reduces cost – a virtuous circle not present in past transitions (coal never got radically cheaper as more was mined; if anything, marginal extraction costs rise over time). The result is an economic push favourable to rapid replacement. This is a novel development in the history of energy transitions and it represents a total phase transformation.

Systemic Efficiency and Smart Demand

Finally, the clean energy transition is helping to usher in a philosophy of smarter energy use. But this is not simply about technology - it’s about a new kind of economic system, and new kinds of lifestyle.

Of course, LED lighting, high-efficiency appliances, smart thermostats, industrial demand response – all these reduce the total energy needed for the same output. Many advanced economies now prioritise energy efficiency as a key resource. Today’s digital technologies enable smarter control over energy consumption: for instance, internet-connected devices can shift their usage to times when renewable power is abundant (reducing strain and fossil fuel backup) or automatically power down when not needed.

Ultimately, this approach to technology must be rooted in a new mindset oriented toward reducing demand, in order to maximise the speed of the disruption. By slowing growth in energy demand and even reducing demand (which electrification in itself can also help) this makes it easier for renewable supply to catch up and increasingly edge out fossil fuel supply. By reducing energy demand, renewable additions can first more easily meet demand and then start to cut more deeply into existing fossil fuel demand.

How Renewables Can End the Extraction Economy

In short, the shift to an electric, digital, postcarbon energy system is not just swapping and adding fuels; it represents a radically different energy paradigm from the 20th-century fossil fuel system that heralds an unprecedented possibility space to end the model of endless extraction.

That possibility space is not rendered inevitable by renewables alone – the technology shift is critical but it can only truly work by an accompanying socio-economic shift toward a new networked paradigm intended to safeguard planetary boundaries.

We need to accelerate the deployment of renewables and we simultaneously need to drastically reduce demand for fossil fuels. Due to the near 70% greater efficiency of renewables, intensified deployment can help greatly with this. Reducing energy demand overall by reshifting societal priorities away from excessive material consumption will also help hugely. But ultimately the properties, features and dynamics of a fully renewable energy system enable a breakthrough to an entirely new type of closed-loop energy system.

Once a fully renewable energy system is built, it will produce clean energy effectively for free with no material inputs for many decades. If optimally designed by supersizing generation capacity using abundant materials permitting downsizing battery storage as I’ve shown elsewhere on AoT, the system can produce significant quantities of surplus electricity at most times of the year. This surplus electricity can enable the next major breakthrough – as we electrify everything from mining to steel production to industrial manufacturing – surplus power in such a 100% renewable system will allow us to fully and cleanly power a near 100% efficient circular economy for materials recycling. This means that we will be able to cleanly and cheaply manufacture new renewables technology to replace the initial installation, within the renewable energy system itself.

Such a new planetary-scale renewable energy system will be commensurate with, and facilitate, a very different type of economy. Instead of an economy premised on increasingly expensive and diminishing scarce resources, it will be premised on abundant clean electricity generated at zero marginal cost. This new system will be networked and distributed, with unprecedented scope to decentralise ownership of energy production to people, thus challenging and overturning the traditional capitalist relation of dispossession. In a scenario of net zero mining and circular materials, material throughput will reduce to near zero amidst clean energy abundance. Conventional measures of economic activity such as GDP, premised on expanding material throughput, will have no use or meaning in this new context.

Already, we can see that while the deployment of renewable energy will help to pave the way toward this scenario, the prevailing neoliberal economy and related organising paradigm offers structural constraints and impediments to this. To accelerate the deployment of renewables and best harness their benefits, the economic system needs to be radically restructured. The good news is that the renewables transformation is one driver that can help facilitate this if pursued as a way to decentralise ownership and break centralised utility monopolies – which in short, means leveraging both market forces and rational government policy now to spur the transformation of energy and markets, and the very foundational structure of the global economy.

A final point to note is that renewable energy is already scaling in a way that follows longstanding and highly predictable patterns of technology disruptions, where disruptive economically-competitive technologies such as  cars, smartphones and digital cameras outperformed and displaced previous incumbents such as horses, landlines and analogue cameras – rendering them largely obsolete.

As previously noted at AoT, robust projections show that the competitive force of renewables puts them on track to disrupt and displace fossil fuels in the same way almost entirely by around mid-century. Renewables are already scaling far faster than conventional analysts like the IEA have anticipated.

And yet this is still too slow to avoid dangerous climate change. The task ahead, then, is to supercharge this energy and economic transformation. We need to mobilise key leverage points in the existing system to facilitate the emergence of the new system from within it.

The Clean Energy Transition Is Real and Accelerating

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s assertion that the green energy transition is a myth – that renewables necessarily only add to our energy appetite without displacing prior fuels – does not withstand scrutiny when you look more closely.

Today’s data, across multiple continents, clearly indicates that new clean energy is actively pushing out the dirtiest fuels in major industrial economies. Coal – the prime target for climate action – is in rapid absolute decline wherever renewables are scaled up (such as the US and Europe). Oil’s monopoly in transportation is being challenged by electrification, with peak oil demand in sight in sectors like cars. Natural gas, often the last fossil fuel standing, is next on the chopping block as wind, solar, storage, and demand-response technologies improve. Crucially, the entire architecture of energy is shifting: an integrated, digital, and electrified system is enabling renewables to do the work that coal mines and oil wells did in the past – but more efficiently and without the emissions.

Yes, the transition is not complete nor fast enough yet to meet evade climate catastrophe – that is a valid critique that more acceleration and systemic change are needed. But completely denying that any transition is happening is simply at odds with reality.

The cumulative effect is starting to show on the global ledger: even the International Energy Agency declared in late 2023 that the electricity sector’s CO₂ emissions may have peaked, and projected that renewables will account for almost all new electricity demand growth worldwide in the coming years, causing fossil fuel generation to finally decline. In 2024, renewables provided one-third of global electricity, overtaking the combined share of coal and gas in growth terms. We are, in other words, about to hit the inflection point of a global phase transition in the energy system – not stuck in a perpetual addition of sources.

The point is not that this inflection point is inevitable, whether technological or economically; the point is that it is increasingly available. Yet it can delayed, or accelerated by critical choices.

In light of all this evidence, Fressoz’s central claim appears overly cynical. The 'global aggregate' is used to obfuscate where real rapid energy transitions are occurring at the local level in many key regions, including the heartlands of industrial civilisation. And this, regrettably, confuses wider understanding of the unprecedented emerging opportunity to shift into a whole new system.

Understanding both the pitfalls and successes of energy transitions can empower us to make better choices that can accelerate the clean energy transformation with a view to phase out fossil fuels, transcend fossil capitalism and end the era of endless extraction. But we first need to realise that energy transformation is not just possible, but on its way.

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