BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - The market value for key energy technologies - solar PV, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps and electrolysers - has reached record levels last year after sustaining average annual growth of around 20 percent over the past decade, according to the International Energy Agency.
The market value surpassed $1.1 trillion in 2025 despite continued price declines for many technologies. During the period 2023-2025 alone, solar PV module prices fell by around 50 percent and battery pack prices by around 30 percent.
Based on policies currently in place, the global market value of these energy technologies is projected to reach around $1.9 trillion by 2035, IEA said in its Energy Technology Perspectives 2026, or ETP-2026. This would amount to roughly the size of the global crude oil market in 2025. If governments' stated policy intentions are also considered, stronger policy support pushes the combined market value to more than $2.6 trillion by 2035. Across both scenarios, electric cars dominate the picture, accounting for around three-quarters of total market value by the mid-2030s.
Cross-border trade has supported the rapid scaling of these energy technologies, even as trade policies affecting them have become more restrictive. Tariffs, duties, anti-dumping measures, local-content provisions and subsidy regimes have proliferated, tightening trade conditions and reshaping trade patterns. IEA cited a case of 2024, when the trade-weighted global average tariff and duty rate across the solar PV supply chain increased nine-fold relative to the previous year, reaching around 36 percent.
These changes have coincided with stronger policy efforts aimed at supporting domestic manufacturing, such as solar PV module assembly and battery cell manufacturing, where scale-up can often be achieved more quickly. Despite these increased incentives to manufacture domestically, international trade in key energy technologies continues to expand. The gross value of international trade in these products climbed to record levels in Q2 2025, the report says.
Demand for these energy technologies is increasingly driven by factors other than climate policy. Steep cost declines have strengthened their cost-competitiveness relative to incumbent technologies, while energy security concerns regarding imported fossil fuels have moved higher up the policy agenda since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Middle East war that broke out on February 28.
Investment in plants that manufacture key energy technologies is cooling as capacity remains comfortably above today's demand levels, the report finds.
IEA notes that China continues to attract most of the global investment in manufacturing for these technologies, accounting for around 70 percent of cumulative spending since 2020. It is also associated with a significant share of the manufacturing investment occurring in other countries, through its foreign direct investment.
While manufacturing investment in clean energy is now cooling globally, underlying growth is taking place in several regions, IEA said, naming the European Union, South Korea and India.
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