Five stylized facts on ownership, specialization, and investment in global power assets

Abstract

We establish five empirical facts about corporate ownership, technological specialization, and investment behavior in the global power sector, analyzing more than 150,000 generation assets owned by approximately 24,000 firms worldwide (2001–2024). Power asset ownership is extraordinarily concentrated, with 80% of global capacity held by just 3% of firms. Firms exhibit extreme technological specialization: approximately 80% own only a single technology, and even diversified firms concentrate more than 70% of capacity in one technology. Investment dynamics are highly persistent and path-dependent, with less than 10% of firms investing in any given year and past behavior strongly predicting future technology choices. Corporate energy transitions are exceedingly rare. Less than 4% of fossil fuel-dominated firms have transitioned to renewable-majority portfolios, and full divestment from fossils remains exceptional. Transitioning firms follow idiosyncratic pathways with no characteristic technology trajectories. These findings highlight fundamental challenges for climate policies that assume responsive corporate investment behavior and underscore the dominance of path dependency in firm-level technology adoption.