Energy forecasting agencies finally catch up to reality on renewables growth and climate change

For decades the International Energy Agency was laughably wrong in its projections for solar power and other renewable energy sources in its annual forecasts. It consistently under-estimated the role of these green energy sources, not just by a little bit but by orders of magnitude.

A few years ago that finally changed and they started putting out reasonable (not obviously laughable) forecasts.

And even more recently they are realizing that we are well on track, due to amazing growth in solar, wind, battery storage and EVs, as well as improved energy efficiency and conservation, to actually reach most of the globe’s “net zero” goals on schedule, and probably even earlier.

I’ve been writing about these trends for over a decade and it’s great to not only have my own forecasts shown to be accurate but to have the international and national forecasting agencies finally catching up to reality.

Fatih Birol, the long-time head of the IEA stated recently:

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.”

The bottomline is that we are well on our way to avoiding definitely the worst case climate change scenarios, and very likely keeping our warming within 1.5 degrees C.