While the legacy media often reports that the world is rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new report from J.P. Morgan shows that narrative is simply not correct. Since 2010, $9 trillion has been spent globally on wind, solar, electric vehicles energy storage, electrification and power grids, but despite this expensive effort — mostly at taxpayer expense — the share of final energy consumption by carbon-free energy sources is advancing by approximately a scant 0.3% to 0.6% per year. 

Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan, explains in “Heliocentrism,” the 15th annual energy paper by the investment firm, that the reason fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy is that modern prosperity is tied to certain kinds of industrial products, including chemicals, steel, cement, food and paper. Approximately 80% of the energy inputs for these products are fossil fuels. JPMorgan Chase is the world's fifth largest bank by total assets, with $3.9 trillion as of 2023. 

“As things stand now, modern prosperity is highly reliant on fossil fuels,” Cembalest said in a podcast on the report. Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., retired professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, estimates on his “The Honest Broker” Substack that at the current pace, the world will not be carbon free until sometime after the year 2200. 

Solar accounts for 2% of total final energy

Cembalest notes that solar capacity, both utility scale and rooftop, is exploding and represents two-thirds of new generation capacity. It will reach about 75% of all new generation capacity for the rest of the decade. 

“There's a lot of people that are so focused on the growth in solar power that they believe that solar power, typically bolted on with some energy storage, can represent the dominant share of where we get our energy from,” Cembalest said. 

Solar accounts for approximately 6% of global electricity generation. However, electricity is only about 33% of the total energy people consume, according to the paper, and by some estimates it’s only about 20%. Translating all that solar power to a share of final energy consumption, which includes all forms of energy, solar is only 2% of total final energy and will grow to 4% to 5% by the end of the decade. 

“While that's impressive growth from a low base, we obviously need to be more focused on the other 95% of where we're going to get our final energy consumption from and rather than just the solar on its own,” Cembalest said. 

Heliocentric

This misperception about the energy transition is why Cembalest, he explained, chose the “Heliocentric” title, referring to the idea that the sun revolves around the Earth, as opposed to the other way around. While completely accurate, the concept was resisted for centuries as opponents and even the Holy Roman Church insisted the science was settled. It was not until the mid-1500's that the theory was generally adopted. 

“While we should be trying to decarbonize as much as we possibly can, we have to be realistic about the pace at which this can be done,” Cembalest said. 

He disputed other predictions of a rapid industrial transition to renewable energy. He said such transitions can happen, and as an example, he pointed to the transition from open hearth furnaces to basic oxygen furnaces in steel production that began in the 1960s and 1970s and took 20 years to complete. That new technology, Cembalest explained, reduced steel production times to 10% of what they were, which allowed for a reduction in 80% to 90% of energy costs. 

“When you have a transition that can pay for itself, like this, it can happen rapidly, but that's not the case with the transition [to non-carbon energy] that we're experiencing now,” he said. 

Transmission and brownouts

Cembalest noted other impediments in the transition to non-carbon energy sources. These include the cost and time it takes to build transmission lines. Electrification, which seeks to transition away from gas-powered appliances to those powered by electricity, runs up against the fact that natural gas is much cheaper than electricity. Cembalest said this is true globally and not just in the U.S. 

He also noted that as the U.S. has increased its share of renewables on the grid, reserve buffers, which is the amount of electricity generation required to meet demand during peak times, have been shrinking. “We're getting more and more close to the point where we might have some kind of brownout situation,” he said. 

The findings of the Morgan report are in line with the latest edition of the Energy Institute’s “Statistical Review of World Energy,” which found that coal, natural gas and oil remained the dominant source of energy in 2023, and coal consumption and production hit record highs. 

While renewables are seeing growth, these analyses show that like it or not, fossil fuels are going to be with us for many decades to come.