How the world’s energy sources stacked up

An interactive stack of world energy by source, from 1800 to 2030, for the world, Europe, the EU-27, the United States and France — under four different accounting conventions, because the convention changes the picture more than the physics does.

By Robin Girard, MINES Paris — PSL.

Open the current version — v1.0.

It runs entirely in your browser, from a single file. Nothing is sent anywhere, and it works offline.

Where the energy actually goes — the companion Sankey: from what we dig up, to what crosses the meter, to what a machine turns into something useful, device by device, under either ruler.

What it is for

Two things, and the second is the reason the buttons exist:

• No energy source has ever been replaced. Coal did not replace wood, oil did not replace coal, gas did not replace oil. Each was added on top while the ones below kept growing. Switch to Shares and watch coal’s share collapse from 1910 while coal itself never stops rising — the trap of reading shares alone.
• “Primary energy” is a convention, not a measurement. Compare physical content with substitution on the same perimeter and year: nuclear is counted at three times its electricity output in one and 2.45 times in the other, while wind is counted once in the first and 2.45 times in the second. Not one joule moves. France reads 50 % low-carbon in primary energy and 23 % in final energy.

Health warnings

• Years past the dashed line are our own extrapolation on the growth rates of the IEA World Energy Outlook 2025 Stated Policies Scenario. The IEA publishes no by-fuel value for 2026, 2027 or 2030.
• The long series back to 1800 exists for the world only (Smil, 1800–1965).
• Traditional biomass is held constant after 2015 by the upstream source.

Content under CC BY 4.0, code under the MIT licence — reuse it in your own teaching, translated or cut up, and say where it came from.

Versions

Each minor release keeps its own permanent link, so a link given to a class still opens the figure it was given against.

• v1.0

Page updated 2026-08-25.