Abstract
The World Energy Outlook reports produced by the International Energy Agency have long been considered the “gold standard” in terms of energy modeling and projecting future trends. It is thus extremely important to assess how well its projections are aligned with sustainable development goals as well as closely tracking observed, historical values. In this work we analyzed thirteen sets of World Energy Outlook projections from the last 25 years. Different scenarios were considered for the following regions and countries: world, OECD, OECD Europe, OECD North America, China, India, Russia, and Africa. The maximum variation between the projections for 2030 CO2 emissions from the energy sector, made between 2006 and 2018 for OECD, Europe and North America were found to be comparable with the gap between the Paris Agreement goals and the voluntary (unconditional) nationally determined contributions to remain below a 2 °C global temperature increase. For the same period, projections for the percentage of renewable electricity exhibited maximum variations between 51% and 96%, signaling a huge underestimation. We discuss the significance of overestimating energy demand and underestimating the rate of renewable energy implementation in the context of 2030 climate and energy policy targets, as well as desirable methodological changes to energy modeling under aggressive climate mitigation policies.
Highlights
These authors performed the most comprehensive analysis of World Energy Outlook (WEO) projections that we were able to find in the literature, by processing data from 15 different reports published between 1994 and 2014, and examining trends for total primary energy demand (TPED) for renewable technologies, such as solar PV, electricity demand, and nuclear energy
WEOs and the urgent need for more stringent emission reduction goals, and to discuss how the variation in the projections compares with the targets for greenhouse gas (GHG)
Whilst the International Energy Agency (IEA) projections are seen to be fairly consistent on a global scale, this consistency can mask very large regional variations
Summary
The large number of projections accumulated during this time-period raises the interesting question of how well energy projections overall have matched observed historical developments [3]. In this context, several authors seem to concur that energy scenarios are more relevant in terms of the qualitative guidelines they can provide for policy implementation than any quantitative predictions they might contain [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
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