Investment in global renewable energy has hit an all-time high of $386 billion in the first half of 2025, a 10% increase over the year before, and shows no signs of slowing down on the clean energy transition despite the changing market landscape and policy uncertainties. The strategic movement of capital towards markets with greater revenue certainty and enabling regulatory frameworks is a milestone success that not only indicates the increasing maturity of renewable technologies but also reflects the strategic reallocation of capital by investors.
Offshore wind surge leads to record investment
The 2H 2025 Renewable Energy Investment Tracker of BloombergNEF shows that global investment in new renewable energy projects reached record highs of up to 386 billion in the first half of 2025, 10% higher than the prior year. But utility-scale solar and onshore wind asset finance contracted by 13% relative to 1H 2024 and constituted the smallest proportion of total investment since 2006.
BNEF identifies the utility-scale investment in solar photovoltaic as the strongest affected, declining 19% relative to the first half of 2024. Markets that experienced the most significant year-on-year drops in investment, such as mainland China, Spain, Greece, and Brazil, have been experiencing increasing curtailment and exposure to negative power prices.
Indicatively, small-scale solar investment in mainland China almost doubled year-on-year, and utility-scale solar installations declined 28%. The record volume of investments was also reflected in offshore wind, which attracted 39 billion dollars in 1H2025 by far surpassing the total investment of 31 billion dollars in 2024. The asset financing of the industry is dictated by big projects and the government auctioning schedule, i.e., big swings in investment over time are quite a natural occurrence.
Uncertainty in US policy results in a fall in investment
Investors and developers in the renewable energy sector are re-evaluating how they allocate capital and putting their funds where the returns on projects will be the highest, said Meredith Annex, Head of Clean Power at BloombergNEF. The fall in financing of utility-scale solar and onshore wind projects in the first half of 2025 has already started tolling on project pipelines.
Compared to all significant regions, the US experienced the largest decrease in new investments in renewable energy in 1H 2025, with dedicated expenditures reduced by 20.5 billion (36 per cent) in the second half of 2024. This is an indicator of how the industry reacted to the 2024 US federal elections, with developers quickly starting to construct near the end of last year.
Annex said: Markets with favourable revenue systems have sustained the pace of renewable energy investment. Whereas projects in markets where revenue certainty is being dislocated, especially when it is down to large swings in policy, as in the US or mainland China, are experiencing a boom-bust cycle in advance of the changes.
Europe comes out as the beneficiary of investments
Conversely, the EU-27 will increase investment by almost $30 billion, or 63 percent, in the first half of 2025 over the second half of 2024. These figures reinforce the notion that firms are shifting capital out of the US, and into Europe – into offshore wind in particular.
New and emerging renewable markets, which experienced considerable growth in 2024, largely stayed at their current levels of investment, instead of securing additional shares of the total world market. Southeast Asia was an exception, with investment increasing by 7% in the second half of 2024.
The announcement of a record 386 billion investment in renewable energy at the beginning of 2025 reflects both the stability of the sector and the strategically thought-out adaptation to evolving political environments on the part of investors. Even as utility-scale projects grapple with the uncertain nature of their revenues, offshore wind and distributed solar are still leading expansion, and more and more capital is being directed to those markets that have stable regulatory regimes and are providing good returns.