elite？

This is a tough one. It's hard to know what the author means with this usage, unless it is just comparing fossil fuel energy sources to wood fires and wind mills. I strongly suggest that the author is not being clear enough about what he or she means. For example, before the late 1890s, all steam ships used reciprocating engines. That means that water was heated in a boiler and then used to drive a piston. In the late 1890s, the Royal Navy of England began looking into steam turbine engines, and eventually adopted them exclusively. HMS Dreadnought began construction in 1905 and came off the ways in 1906. Because she used steam turbine engines, she was faster, more heavily armed and armored that all previous battleships. She also had different fuel requirements. Reciprocating steam engines can burn coal, or even wood, as they only need to heat water to the boiling point. But steam turbine engines rely on high pressure steam, raised to a higher temperature more quickly, and so require what is called bunker oil--a petoleum product. It was for that reason that the English went out looking for large sources of petoleum--first to Persian (now called Iran) and then to the Arabian penninsula. This change in the design of naval vessels had a profound affect on world politics. But whether it's coal or petroleum, we're still dealing with fossil fuels.

However, this statement by the author is awfully vague. If you could provide some to the context which came before this sentence, it might help. It sounds as though the author is refering to the generation of electicity. That could explain this sentence. But it wouldn't explain the nonsensical content. Economies of scale were practiced in ancient times (for example, the Roman latifundia), markets were adversarial long before what is usually called the industrial revolution. Rationalized hierarchical organizations date back thousands of years, too.

This all sounds like politico-economic propaganda to me, and i strongly suspect that the author has a political motive for referring to fossil fuels as "elite." Fossil fuels were in use before what has been termed the industrial revolution, and the expansion of the use of fossil fuels has followed technological development--not any social or political changes. It will help if you can provide more context, sentences which came before this one.