Energy Dept.'s Evolving Outlook for US Power Sector

Deck: 

Looking Back on Accuracy of Past Forecasts

Fortnightly Magazine - August 2016
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In May, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, EIA, released the first results from its Annual Energy Outlook 2016, AEO.

Figure 1 - U.S. GDP

The AEO Reference Case is the business-as-usual trend estimate. This is given known technology and technological and demographic trends, and includes one possible implementation of the Clean Power Plan, CPP. EIA also prepared a No CPP case that assumes that the CPP is not implemented.

The AEO is a yearly publication for EIA, presenting the latest thinking on future trends. There's a good reason we don't call it the once-and-forever Energy Outlook.

Our thinking about the future changes over time with respect to economic conditions, policies and regulations, technology performance, and market conditions. These in turn shape the AEO projections, and the AEO published this year may look quite different from the AEO projections made in years past.

Rather than just looking at the current AEO in isolation, we can gain additional valuable insights by comparing AEOs published over time. As one example, earlier AEOs projected the U.S. to dramatically increase natural gas imports, but now AEO2016 projects the U.S. to soon become a net exporter.

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