The “gold standard” of long-term energy analysis: the annual report of the International Energy Agency, an independent arm of the OECD in Paris. The report describes global energy trends, energy and the Sustainable Development Goals, and scenarios for oil, natural gas, coal, energy efficiency, renewables, and growing dependence on electricity.
Scenarios:
- The Current Policies Scenario (CPS) projects a steady annual increase in energy demand of 1.3% till 2040, and leads to increasing strains on almost all aspects of energy security.
- The Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) aims to provide a detailed sense of the direction in which existing policy frameworks and today’s policy ambitions would take the energy sector out to 2040. The share of renewables in the power mix rises from 25% today to around 40% in 2040. This scenario falls short of the Paris Agreement and the SDG’s.
- The Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS) “sets out an ambitious and pragmatic vision of how the global energy sector can evolve in order to achieve critical energy-related SDGs. It starts with the SDG outcomes and then works back to set out what would be needed to deliver these goals in a realistic and cost-effective way.” This scenario aims to limit global temperature increases “to below 1.8 °C with a 66% probability without reliance on global net-negative CO2 emissions; this is equivalent to limiting the temperature rise to 1.65 °C with a 50% probability.” Assumes a reduction of global CO2 emissions from 33 billion tonnes in 2018 to less than 10 billion tonnes by 2050 to net zero by 2070.
