Banks Hit $1 Trillion in Clean Energy—But Fall Short

Global banks financed $1.15 trillion in low-carbon energy in 2025. The climate math still doesn't add up.

By The Energy-Climate Desk

For the first time, global banks arranged more than $1 trillion in low-carbon energy financing in a single year. The milestone sounds decisive. The numbers behind it are not. According to BloombergNEF's latest Energy Supply Banking Ratios report, banks globally channeled $0.97 of low-carbon finance for every dollar of fossil-fuel financing in 2025—a ratio that remains far below the 4:1 level that analysts say is needed this decade to align with climate targets. [1]

The total volume of energy supply financing reached $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 15% from 2024. [1] Low-carbon financing grew faster than its fossil counterpart—up 16% year-on-year, reaching a five-year high of $1.15 trillion—but fossil-fuel volumes also rose, climbing to $1.19 trillion, driven by elevated oil and gas deal flow across recourse debt, public equity, project finance, and tax equity. [1] In aggregate, the world's banks are doing more of everything.

That tension—accelerating clean finance alongside stubborn fossil growth—is the central paradox of the current energy transition. Volume records are being broken. The structural ratios required for a credible net-zero trajectory are not.

The widest gulf between rhetoric and reality can be found at the top of the league table. JPMorgan Chase remained the largest bank by energy-supply financing volume, arranging approximately $100 billion in 2025—but its low-carbon-to-fossil ratio fell to 0.63:1, dragged down by rising fossil-fuel financing in the US and a slight drop in low-carbon financing. [1] MUFG ranked second with $77 billion, and its ratio also declined, reflecting heavier fossil activity, particularly in the American market. [1]

The outlier among the top ten is Bank of China. Its Energy Supply Banking Ratio reached 1.84:1 in 2025—up sharply from 1.04:1 in 2024 and more than triple its 0.58:1 ratio in 2021—making it the only top 10 bank that has experienced sustained year-on-year improvements in its ratio. [1] The driver is grid financing, not solar panels or wind turbines: State Grid Corporation of China issued over $105 billion in grid financing in 2025, up $67 billion from 2024, and Bank of China has been a main facilitator of this debt. [1] By the first half of 2026, State Grid had already issued an additional $61 billion in debt, suggesting Bank of China's ratio will stay elevated. [1]

Grid infrastructure rarely earns the headline treatment afforded to offshore wind or utility-scale solar. But it is, increasingly, where the scorecard gets decided—and where the gap between regions is most visible.

Europe held the highest regional Energy Supply Banking Ratio of any geography in 2025, rising to 2.5:1 from 2.3:1 in 2024. [1] China's regional ratio jumped to 1.6:1, as oil and gas financing volumes declined and grid spend surged. [1] North America, by contrast, moved hard in the opposite direction. The region remained the largest single energy financing market, with total volumes reaching $973 billion—but the additional capital flowed predominantly to fossil fuels. [1]

In North America, fossil-fuel financing increased by $92 billion in 2025, while low-carbon financing rose by just $8 billion—pushing the regional ratio down to 0.5:1. [1] Within the US specifically, financing for companies with coal-related revenue exposure reached record levels at $42 billion. [1] That figure, alone, tells a story about the distance between stated net-zero commitments and actual capital allocation inside the world's largest financial system.

Disclosure, in this context, becomes its own form of pressure. Banks that publish their ratios create a benchmark others can reference—and critics can cite. The metric's spread across the industry may be the quietest lever currently in motion.

The Energy Supply Banking Ratio has gained traction as a disclosure standard, if not yet as a behavioral one. Bank of Nova Scotia and the Royal Bank of Canada joined JPMorgan and Citi in publishing their own versions of the ratio this year. [1] The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce published a methodology but has not yet disclosed an actual ratio. [1] BloombergNEF notes that greater disclosure may be the first step toward further action on the ratios, even as many non-disclosing banks continue to post year-on-year improvements. [1] The metric is spreading. The question is whether it changes behavior or simply documents it.

One analytical wrinkle complicates the standard narrative. When BloombergNEF adjusts its ratios to reflect company capital expenditure rather than revenue, the picture shifts considerably. The capex-based ratio stands at 1.32:1 in 2025—higher than the 0.97:1 revenue-based figure—and under this methodology, banks have facilitated more low-carbon than fossil-fuel financing every year since 2022. [1] The gap between the two measures reflects a structural lag: revenue captures where a company has been; capex indicates where it is going. For utilities in China and Europe, the delta is particularly striking. [1]

The capex-based ratio among deals for utility issuers reached 3.0:1 globally in 2025, compared to a 1.59:1 revenue-based figure. [1] For Chinese utilities specifically, the capex approach yields a ratio of 12.7:1—far above the 4.24:1 revenue-based equivalent. [1] That divergence suggests that what banks are financing for the future looks considerably cleaner than the legacy portfolios those same companies still report as revenue. Whether the financials will eventually converge with the capex trajectory is the central bet the energy transition is placing on institutional capital.

The data holds two competing truths in suspension. Clean energy financing has never been larger. The gap between what banks are doing and what the climate requires has never been more precisely measured. Both things are true simultaneously, and the discomfort of that coexistence is where policy, capital, and accountability will have to meet.

A ratio of 0.97:1 is, on one reading, almost parity—a system on the cusp. On another, it is a system that still routes more capital to fossil fuels than to the alternatives, at a moment when the 4:1 target this decade is not a stretch goal but a baseline requirement. [1] The banks arranging these deals are not acting irrationally. They are responding to demand that exists now—from governments, from energy companies, from infrastructure investors who have not yet pivoted. The $1 trillion milestone deserves to be marked. It also deserves to be contextualized: a threshold crossed is not a trajectory secured.