Three major forecasting challenges are observed and briefly analysed: Overprediction of oil consumption Underprediction of coal consumption Underprediction of other renewables Introduction The International Energy Agency tackles a monumental task every year when compiling its World Energy Outlook report: forecasting global energy consumption over the next 2-3 decades. Over the years, the IEA has taken quite a lot of flak from critics with 20/20 hindsight about fairly large deviations between forecasted and actual numbers. For example, the IEA failed to forecast the plateau in conventional oil production which started about one decade ago and generally underpredicted the expansion rate of modern renewables. But just how large are these deviations? This article will take a quantitative look at 15 years of IEA World Energy Outlooks (available here ) and compare the forecasts to actual data from the BP Statistical Review to get […]