The renewable illusion: Why fossil fuels keep winning. Despite many optimistic narratives, the reality is more sobering. Renewables are not displacing fossil fuels, but are instead playing catch-up with rising global energy demand.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2025/08/01/the-renewable-illusion-why-fossil-fuels-keep-winning/

by The_Weekend_Baker

11 comments

  1. When a source compensates for rising demand and becomes the prime source in an increasing number of countries you can very well call this a displacement, even when the displacement in total global energy consumption hasn’t happened yet. Nuclear is shrinking, fossil fuels are stagnating and only renewables are growing like crazy since years now.

  2. Yeah, that’s still displacing, like by definition.
    It’s not like renewables magically cause electric demand to stop going up and everybody even remotely interested in the topic knows that wind and solar are intermittent and can’t do baseline and they likely know batteries aren’t quite good enough.

    It makes you wonder about the person who wrote or posted this. Do they not know anything about renewables or are they just being deceitful to cause trouble? 

    New power demand is still power demand so if it’s being met by renewables that is still fossil fuel or perhaps nuclear being displaced. It’s not an especially hard concept to understand!

  3. The Hopium/Copium in the comments. Holy actual crap.

  4. A large “downsizing” in consumption is coming to the citizens of Earth..We can do it voluntary or we can let “nature take it’s course”..

  5. We need a carbon tax. That is the most effective way to put the cost on the energy producers who are profiting from our ecological collapse.

    If capitalism got us into this and we can change systems then we have to utilize capitalism to fix things.

    But yes, we still need to reduce consumption even after pushing renewable energy even more.

  8. >reNewABleS ARE noT DiSPLaCIng foSsiL fUELS

    *ignores the difference between primary energy and useful energy

    *bases all conclusions on a single datapoint (2024 vs 2023)

    *ignores academic litterature and forecasts saying otherwise

    *forgets about compound growth rates

  9. It takes a very selective focus to look at the trajectory of renewables over the last five years and then tell people to give up hope because fossils have not gone down.

  10. Fossil Fuels keep winning for 2 reasons: government subsidies, and the fact it’s way easier to turn a profit with fossil fuels because the producer will always need more, and thus the Fossil Fuel provider has lots of money to expand.

    Renewables like wind and solar are decentralized and have an upfront cost and then seldom very few maintenance costs. So there really is only the initial cost for profit. Other Renewables like Hydrogen are not adequately developed to be a mainstream market; but in hydrogen’s case, I see it being a major competitor to fossil fuels due to how abundant it’s base elements are, and how just like fossil fuels, it needs to be resupplied.

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