This paper introduces a growth model that considers the indicator of economic complexity as a measure of capabilities for exporting the high value-added (sophisticated) products. Empirically, the paper analyzes the effects of the renewable and the non-renewable energy consumption on the economic growth in the panel data of 29 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for the period from 1990 to 2013. For this purpose, the paper considers the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and the panel quantile regression (PQR) estimations. The paper finds that not only the economic complexity, but also both the non-renewable and the renewable energy consumption are positively associated with a higher rate of economic growth. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.