Published September 18, 2026
By NZero
Global energy financing has become one of the clearest signals of how fast the energy transition is actually being funded, rather than simply discussed in policy circles. Bloomberg NEF’s newly released Energy Supply Banking Ratios (ESBR) 2026 report tracks how banks around the world are splitting their financing between low-carbon and fossil-fuel energy supply, drawing on more than 660,000 debt securities, 5,000 equity actions, and thousands of project finance deals. The headline finding is notable: low-carbon financing came close to matching fossil-fuel financing in 2025, continuing a multi-year trend toward parity. At the same time, the report is candid that this progress remains gradual and falls well short of what would be required to meet global climate goals this decade. The data offers a useful, if sobering, snapshot of where capital is actually flowing across regions, sectors, and asset classes.
The core metric in the report, the Energy Supply Banking Ratio, rose to 0.97 to 1 in 2025, up from 0.95 to 1 the year before. In practical terms, for every dollar of fossil-fuel financing that banks arranged or underwrote, they facilitated 97 cents of low-carbon financing. In aggregate, the roughly 3,000 banks tracked in the dataset facilitated 2.3 trillion dollars of energy-supply financing in 2025, a 15 percent increase from the prior year and just 17 billion dollars below the 2021 high. Low-carbon financing grew 16 percent year on year, outpacing the 13 percent growth seen in fossil-fuel financing.
This increase in financing activity coincided with a broader recovery in corporate debt markets. Global corporate debt issuance rose 6 percent in 2025 to 23 trillion dollars, returning to 2021 levels as markets recovered from the interest rate shocks of 2022. Low-carbon debt issuance returned to roughly its 2021 level, while fossil-fuel debt issuance recovered more slowly, a pattern the report links to continued capital discipline among major oil and gas companies. Despite the improving ratio, BNEF is explicit that the current pace is far from sufficient. The report states that an average ratio closer to 4 to 1 is needed this decade for the financing mix to align with global climate targets, meaning the 0.97 to 1 figure represents a fraction of the shift still required.
Beneath the global average, regional results moved in very different directions in 2025. Europe recorded the highest regional ratio at 2.5 to 1, up from 2.3 to 1 in 2024, driven largely by a 75 percent year-on-year increase in wind financing to 98 billion dollars, much of it tied to offshore wind project finance such as East Anglia Three in the United Kingdom and Calvados Offshore Wind in France. China’s ratio jumped to 1.6 to 1 from 1.0 to 1, lifted by a record 288 billion dollars in low-carbon financing, up 56 percent year on year, with State Grid Corporation of China alone issuing 105 billion dollars in grid-related debt.
North America told a different story. The region’s ratio fell to 0.5 to 1 as fossil-fuel financing grew faster than low-carbon activity. Financing tied to oil and gas majors, midstream companies, and oilfield services firms drove much of this increase, and coal financing, while only 7 percent of the region’s total fossil-fuel financing, set a record at 46 billion dollars, up 36 percent from 2024. The United States alone accounted for 36 percent of global energy-supply financing in 2025, with 538 billion dollars directed to fossil fuels compared with 295 billion dollars for low-carbon energy. Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia saw low-carbon financing grow from just 1.2 billion dollars in 2021 to 15 billion dollars in 2025, though this still represented only about a fifth of the country’s total energy financing, while fossil-fuel financing in Canada declined 12 percent over the same period.
Within low-carbon financing, power grids emerged as the single largest driver of growth. Grid financing nearly doubled over two years to almost 287 billion dollars in 2025, accounting for 40 percent of the total increase in low-carbon financing between 2024 and 2025. Wind financing rebounded to 219 billion dollars, making it the second-largest low-carbon category, while solar was the only major low-carbon sector to decline, falling 11 percent to 171 billion dollars amid overcapacity and price competition among solar equipment manufacturers.
This year’s report also introduced a supplementary ratio based on company capital expenditure rather than current revenue. Because revenue reflects past investment decisions while capex signals where companies are directing future spending, this alternative view paints a more forward-leaning picture. On a capex-adjusted basis, the global ratio reaches 1.32 to 1, meaningfully higher than the 0.97 to 1 revenue-based figure, and for utility companies specifically, the capex-based ratio climbs to roughly 3 to 1 compared with 1.59 to 1 under the revenue-based approach. BNEF notes this suggests companies, and utilities in particular, are allocating capital toward low-carbon assets at a faster rate than their current revenue mix would indicate. Separately, bank-level transparency around these ratios is growing, with JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce all now publishing some version of their own energy supply financing ratios, following investor pressure from groups including the New York City Comptroller’s office.
Taken together, the 2026 ESBR report describes an energy financing landscape that is shifting, but unevenly and slowly. The narrowing global gap between low-carbon and fossil-fuel financing, the rapid growth in grid and wind investment, and the more optimistic signal from capex-based metrics all point to real momentum behind the energy transition. At the same time, North America’s widening reliance on fossil-fuel financing, a record year for coal financing in the region, and a global ratio still far below the roughly 4 to 1 pace BNEF associates with climate targets show how much distance remains. As more banks begin disclosing their own financing ratios and methodologies continue to evolve, this data is likely to become an increasingly closely watched indicator of whether capital markets are keeping pace with the energy transition, or simply inching toward it.
