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The Energy Transition Is Working. The Data Tells a More Complicated Story.

Jan Gunash · Co-Founder & CGO · April 6, 2026

The best questions are not always the comfortable ones. Like: when the record numbers say the energy transition is accelerating, why are coal plants being kept alive, obscure industrial chemicals spiking in price, and the ocean floor being rushed toward extraction before we know what lives there? And what connects all three of those things?

The answer is the same in each case. The headline data is real. What it conceals is more important than what it shows.

A Genuine Record

Something remarkable happened in 2025. Renewable energy accounted for 85.6% of all new power capacity added globally, pushing 692 gigawatts of new capacity online and lifting renewables to 49.4% of total global installed electricity capacity (source: IRENA). Solar alone contributed 511 gigawatts, roughly 75% of all renewable additions. It was only in 2023 that renewables crossed the threshold of generating 30% of the world's electricity. The pace of that growth is genuinely extraordinary and the economics driving it are now structural. More than 90% of new renewable energy projects globally are cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives.

IRENA's Director-General put it in terms that matter most right now: countries that invested in the energy transition are weathering the current energy crisis with less economic damage. A more decentralised energy system is structurally more resilient. That is not an environmental argument. It is an infrastructure argument.

What the Record Conceals

Here is what the headline number does not say. That 85.6% share of new capacity additions was actually a decrease from 2024, when renewables accounted for around 92% of global additions (source: The Register). The gap was filled by something that deserves attention. Non-renewable additions nearly doubled globally compared to 2024. China added 100 gigawatts of non-renewable capacity, most of which was coal. Natural gas projects nearly tripled in the United States.

The Iran war is now pulling both threads in different directions at once. Italy voted this week to extend the life of its remaining coal plants until 2038, thirteen years later than planned. Germany is reviewing whether to reactivate reserve plants. South Korea extended three plants due to close this year (source: Carbon Brief). All three decisions were framed as temporary and pragmatic. That is exactly what was said about the coal rebound that followed Europe's 2022 energy crisis, a rebound that studies later found led neither to a faster nor a slower transition. It simply entrenched existing trajectories.

The way progress in the energy transition is being measured is creating a systematic blind spot. Global installed capacity figures capture how much renewable infrastructure exists. They do not capture how much fossil fuel infrastructure is being extended or locked in. A coal plant kept online for another decade does not appear in an annual deployment figure. A gas power purchase agreement running to 2045 is not captured in a capacity addition number. The record is real. The framing around it is doing significant work to make the picture more coherent than the underlying data supports.

The Inputs the Transition Forgot

Beneath the capacity numbers lies a supply chain problem that is becoming acute in ways the transition planning frameworks did not anticipate. Sulfur is the clearest current example.

Sulfur is not on most critical minerals lists. It does not have a strategic reserve, a public price benchmark, or a data monitoring framework. It is a byproduct of oil refining and natural gas processing, historically treated as an inconvenient output rather than a resource to be managed. That framing is now dangerously out of date.

Sulfuric acid, produced from sulfur, is the essential chemical input for hydrometallurgy, the process used to extract lithium, cobalt, and nickel from ore. Without it, the battery supply chain for electric vehicles and energy storage does not function. It is also required to produce phosphate fertilizers, meaning food security and clean energy share a common dependency on a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. The global sulfur supply gap is projected to reach approximately 5.13 million tons in 2026 (source: HDIN Research). Prices have risen more than sixfold since early 2024.

The Iran war has now tipped a tightening market into acute disruption. Qatar's Ras Laffan facility, struck by Iranian drones, was one of the world's largest sulfur producers. Russia implemented sulfuric acid export restrictions in December 2025 and its refinery recovery remains uncertain. The price of sulfuric acid in Africa has risen at least 30% since the war began and is still rising (source: CNBC / Goldman Sachs). Tungsten, sulfur, and helium have all climbed sharply in recent weeks, in some cases by more than oil itself.

This is the same structural problem this newsletter examined with helium two weeks ago, and with rare earths the week before that. Sulfur is a byproduct, which means its supply is directly tied to the output of the oil and gas industry it is embedded in. As the energy transition advances, global refining capacity is expected to peak after 2035 and gradually decline, fundamentally limiting the long-term supply ceiling for sulfur at exactly the moment demand from the new energy sector is growing fastest (source: SunSirs). There is no public data infrastructure to monitor this gap, no strategic reserve to buffer against it, and no early warning system to see the shock coming before it arrives.

The Floor of the Ocean

The same logic now extends downward, literally, to the abyssal plain. The pressure to mine the deep sea is being driven by the same minerals shortage the energy transition created. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the eastern Pacific contains billions of tons of polymetallic nodules holding nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese. The minerals are real. The demand is real. And the governance moment is closer than most people realise.

The Council of the International Seabed Authority concluded the first part of its 31st Session last week, advancing negotiations on the Mining Code that will govern commercial deep-sea mining in international waters (source: ISA / Ocean Mining Intel). At the same time, a parallel process is moving faster and outside the multilateral framework. Following an executive order to fast-track domestic seabed mining permits, NOAA finalised new rules in January 2026 allowing exploration and commercial recovery licenses to be applied for simultaneously. The Metals Company updated its application accordingly, covering sites that overlap with areas under existing ISA exploration contracts. The ISA Secretary-General has stated clearly that unilateral action runs counter to international law and the principle of the common heritage of humankind (source: Ocean Vision Legal).

The science behind the caution is not ideological. A large-scale industrial mining trial in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone found that macrofaunal density decreased by 37% directly within the mining tracks and species richness dropped by 32% within two months of the test (source: Nature Ecology and Evolution). An estimated 90% of the species collected during baseline surveys had never been previously described. Four decades after a separate earlier test, biological impacts in many organism groups persist (source: Nature). The recovery timescale for deep-sea ecosystems is measured in decades to centuries. The decision being made now is effectively irreversible on any human planning horizon.

The EU's position in ISA negotiations rests explicitly on the Precautionary Principle: without baseline environmental data spanning multiple years, commercial mining operations violate foundational principles of international environmental law. That is not ideology. It is a direct statement about data inadequacy. Forty countries are calling for a moratorium not because they oppose the minerals but because the data needed to set meaningful environmental standards does not yet exist (source: Mining.com).

The Same Problem, Different Depths

The capacity record, the sulfur shortage, and the deep-sea mining governance crisis are not separate stories. They are the same story operating at different scales and in different domains.

In each case, a consequential decision is being shaped by data that is incomplete, aggregated in misleading ways, or simply absent. In each case, the gap between what is being measured and what actually matters is large enough to produce real harm. Global capacity figures smooth over the fossil fuel lock-in happening at the country level. Sulfur has no monitoring framework to flag its structural supply constraints before they become crises. The deep sea is being assessed for commercial extraction before the baseline data needed to define what protection would even mean has been collected.

The energy transition is genuinely happening. The record numbers are real. But the infrastructure of data and governance that should be guiding that transition, flagging its blind spots, and protecting against its unintended consequences is not keeping pace with the physical systems it is supposed to inform.

The Path Forward

Measuring the energy transition accurately requires disaggregated data at the country and contract level, tracking not just what is being built but what is being extended and locked in. Sulfur, bromine, and the other process chemicals that make battery manufacturing and mineral extraction possible need to be brought inside critical minerals monitoring frameworks, with transparent price benchmarks and supply chain visibility that currently does not exist. And the ISA's July 2026 session needs to be preceded by a serious, coordinated investment in baseline biodiversity surveys across the full extent of exploration contract areas, with results shared publicly in standardised formats.

These are not separate policy asks. They are the same underlying requirement: that the data systems informing the transition be as ambitious as the transition itself. The renewable capacity record is a genuine achievement. It deserves an equally honest accounting of everything the number does not yet show.

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Want to contribute your thoughts or findings in data and AI with climate, energy, or nature? Message Jan Gunash on LinkedIn or send an email to jgunash@projectcoeus.com.