Paving the way towards a sustainable future or lagging behind? An ex-post analysis of the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook

Abstract

Since 1993, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has published its flagship publication, the World Energy Outlook (WEO), which has become the authoritative report on energy statistics for the reference year and guiding energy demand developments for the decades to come. This research seeks to understand the evolution of energy demand in the WEO and how the WEO projections have performed compared to historical developments. Furthermore, this study analyses the range of future projections for the central WEO scenarios from 1993 to 2022, the outlook scenarios, compared to the scenarios aimed at higher levels of sustainability, the normative scenarios. The results suggest that while the IEA has accurately anticipated primary and final energy demand growth, it has historically overestimated the growth in fossil fuels and nuclear electricity generation and severely underestimated the growth in key renewable technologies including solar photovoltaics and wind power, the latter occurring across scenarios. Furthermore, projections beyond 2020 largely fail to anticipate the terawatt-scale PV developments that are expected by market and solar photovoltaics experts. Despite sufficient technological complexity, an artificial cap on renewables and power-to-X technology growth can be observed in favour of nuclear power, bioenergy, and fossil fuels coupled with carbon capture and sequestration. Such perspectives, especially in the normative scenarios, may impede the growth of technologies that are essential to fully defossilise energy-industry systems. Thus, increased transparency of assumptions and exploration into scenarios demonstrating the feasibility of higher variable renewable growth, and thus power-to-X applications can help spur public confidence and investments from policymakers and investors. • WEO energy scenarios have significantly underestimated solar PV growth potential. • Outlook and normative scenarios indicate bias for nuclear and against renewables. • Power-to-X flexibility options exist in the GEC model, though their use is limited. • Increased transparency of assumptions for key technologies is required. • Exogenous limitations of key technologies may impede global energy transitions.

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