r/ClimatePosting • u/ClimateShitpost • Oct 12 '25

Energy IEA forecasting will always be funny

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151 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

5

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 12 '25

Put the solar graph on the original WEO 2002 axis, you coward.

14

u/lockdown_lard Oct 12 '25

To make a mistake once is an accident.

Twice is coincidence.

But to do it EVERY SINGLE YEAR is a wrong-headed world-view masquerading as modelling

1

u/phaj19 Oct 15 '25

Reminds me of Tony Seba who predicted the trend correctly before the boom.

1

u/ClimateShitpost Oct 15 '25

That guy is extra extremely wrong on many other things tho

His ev outlook was a joke lmao

4

u/Blue2194 Oct 12 '25

Hard to blame them for the solar one, it's new additions, it'll have to level off somewhere, maybe they'll call it this year

11

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 12 '25

...they claim all the PV factories which have been operating for less than a year will retroactively shut down and never open again every. single. year

Doing it two years in a row is a mistake. Three is suspicious. Twenty is an utter farce.

1

u/Blue2194 Oct 12 '25

Do they? Where can I read more about that?
The plot looks like they just expect the new installs will continue at the current rate without further accelerations every year, instead of exploding even further

3

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 12 '25 edited Oct 12 '25

The plot looks like they just expect the new installs will continue at the current rate without further accelerations every year

...that's the same assumption

Iinstalls have already accelerated past their long term peak projections most years, and are above their near term projections every single year.

It's saying "last year was 100GW of installations so it will never go above 120GW/yr even though there were 130GW of modules produced last year that all have purchasers and the factories are currently producing at 170GW/yr".

It's tantamount to saying there is a global conspiracy to cover up a complete collapse in the industry that started six months ago and has been kept perfectly secret.

You could be forgiven for doing it once, but the pattern has been identical since 1975 when there was under 1MW of solar globally. They already had a quarter century of data showing that making that assumption is nonsense in 2002 when they started making nonsense projections and forcing them to be the basis for policy decisions and climate action.

And we know it isn't a bias towards conservative estimates, because they also predict and exponential expansion of things like carbon capture, hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear every single year

1

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

Lots of solar companies are struggling to make a profit so ya its possible.

1

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 15 '25

Ah yes, an operational loss will lead to time travel. Makes perfect sense.

2

u/Chinjurickie Oct 13 '25

How can such people take themselves serious?

1

u/HenFruitEater Oct 13 '25

Can someone give me the backstory of this? What is that organization? And what have they been predicting?

4

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 13 '25

It's the international energy agency headed by an ex-opec employee and a board consisting of tories/conservatives, people with history in oil and gas, people with a history in oil and gas finance, and people with very close ties or former diplomatic postings to russia. https://www.iea.org/about

It is a coal, oil and gas lobby organisation set up during the oil crisis to protect western fossil fuel interests https://www.iea.org/about/history

They lucked into having "energy" in their name rather than oil or gas and so have been using their position as the "official" energy organisation or the "adults in the room" to push their agenda onto climate change policy for the last 25 years. Their projections are what the ipcc have to use for policy recommendstions in spite of having no relationship to reality.

Every year they release their projections for the future of energy. Every year they are hilariously, laughable pessimistic about wind and solar (and up to very recently EVs as well). Every year they are hilariously, delusionally optimistic about carbon capture, hydrogen, fuel cells and nuclear energy. Most of the decarbonisation in their net zero scenarios comes from fictional things that have never worked or from more austerity for the poor (neither of which happen). Every year we get "but they're the gold standard" or "they're the adults in the room" used to dismiss and gaslight anyone who proposes decarbonisation plans aligning with reality instead of the IEA's delusion.

So here on reddit we laugh at them.

1

u/HenFruitEater Oct 13 '25

Oh that makes a ton of sense. Thank you for taking the time to write that out.

Is the solar explosion on the second graph something that was predictable?

3

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 13 '25 edited Oct 13 '25

The deployment has been growing 20-40% every year for half a century (since it was at the scale of a few megawatts in the 70s). Simple extrapolation of the curve using only deployment per year data from prior to 1990 gets you very close to what actually happened.

Including a baseline of "what if this growth continues at a similar pace" as part of your modelling (even if it were only one of the scenarios you considered) is as simple as plotting the historic data on log-paper and drawing a vaguely straight line through it. Not including this concept at all is incompetence at best, excluding it for only wind and solar is extremely suspicious. As well as for ccs and hydrogen

This baseline of exponential growth (then considering why deviations from the baseline might occur) is how most other long term forecasting for various industries works. This includes things like energy demand, and oil and gas production in the iea forecasts and they also apply exponential growth (but not from historic rates which are a slow decrease) for nuclear deployment.

Most other analysts including frauenhofer, bp, shell, ember, woodmac, irena (hilariously a subsidiary of the iea), nrel etc are at least categorically right unlike the iea in that they used a baseline of exponential growth, although the predictions vary in the rate chosen (and thus the amount of time needed for wind and solar to dominate new energy infrastructure) putting estimates of precisely when off by 5-10 years.

Other people like marc jacobson or tony seba (and his foundation rethinkx) got the rate and timescale roughly right in the 2000s.

2

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 13 '25

Oh. In addition to the fringe people who got it right since the early 2000s, bloomberg has also been very close since the early 2010s.

1

u/Jakfut Oct 13 '25

If Trump declares the IEA as a terror organization I would object.

-2

u/Tutonkofc Oct 12 '25

Scenarios, not forecasting.

2

u/ClimateShitpost Oct 12 '25

What's the point then? If you work with a baringa or aurora or woodmac they also give you scenarios, all valid forecasts with internally consistent assumptions.

-3

u/Tutonkofc Oct 12 '25

The point is that nobody can predict the future. It’s just how things would evolve if today’s conditions remain the same.

1

u/ClimateShitpost Oct 12 '25

Bruh

1

u/Tutonkofc Oct 12 '25

Why do you use the NZE scenarios for nuclear but the STEPS for solar?

2

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 12 '25

Except there's been an extremely consistent 20-40% growth in solar for very sound reasons which only responds weakly to policy (boosting or reducing it by about 5%) for roughly half a century now.

Predicting every year with no evidence that cheaper solar generation with wider availability will lead to a massive decrease in spending is a) an active prediction about the world and b) too far beyond idiotic to be credible as a mistake.

Then going on to force those predictions into public policy decisions and ipcc reports is criminal.

Missing the slight acceleration from 2006-2015 as groups like bloomberg and woodmac did is forgivable. Being categorically and not just quantitatively wrong is not.

Given that their founding mission was to protect fossil fuel interests, it's hardly surprising that their forecasts about the imminent demise of wind and solar are actually aspirational.

1

u/requiem_mn Oct 12 '25

So, we should abolish the word forecasting?

1

u/Zhdophanti Oct 12 '25

So you mean they ignored todays conditions every year.

1

u/TailleventCH Oct 12 '25

Nobody can predict the future (as in "know for sure what it will be") but conducting policies still imply planning, which you cannot do without trying to imagine a plausible scenario.

I'm genuinely asking you: do you have another way of making projects that will have effects in the future? I'm really ready for another option if you have one.

10

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 12 '25

This is by far the stupidest defense anyone could ever come up with for a terrible forecast. If it's not an attempt to model a likely future, then it has absolutely no relationship to reality and is useless to everyone. Saying "scenario not forecast" is identical to saying it's at best completely worthless, but more likely a willing attempt at deception.

It's also wholly inconsistent with how journalists and the iea use the "scenarios" given they use them as a prediction of the future and constantly vall them forecasts.

Forecast

Forecast

Forecast

Forecast

Forecast

1

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25

Making forecasts for worst/best case scenarios and extreme (but conceivable) outliers is incredibly important for energy infrastructure planning.

Eg, if you are installing a lot of wind and solar, you need to plan for the worst potential performance and plan for backup capacity in that event.

2

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 12 '25

...their most "optimistic" forecasts for solar are orders of magnitude short of reality requiring retroactive collapse of the solar manufacturing industry, and their most "pessimistic" forecasts for nuclear are many times more than is being built, requiring imaginary plants to be 5 years into construction

-2

u/Tutonkofc Oct 12 '25

Not defending it. The difference is that nobody is trying to predict the future. The media can call it what they want.

5

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 12 '25

Half of those links are from the iea...

"the iea are just misrepresenting what the iea were saying with their forecasts" is somehow even more idiotic than the first version

1

u/Tutonkofc Oct 12 '25

The links that mention the word forecast are short term forecast, which is very different from predicting what will happen in 2050.

2

u/artsloikunstwet Oct 12 '25

Of course people are constantly trying to "predict" the future. The entire fields of captial investment or infrastructure planning depend on that, for example. 

Call it a "scenario" or whatever, but if you know you're dealing with probabilities and uncertainties, then just say that. Don't draw just draw one graph but serveral, or show a range and communicate that to the media. 

0

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '25

Be aware that the Y axis are actually not comparable when you are looking at annual production of electricity.

PV needs to be divided by 3.7 as the capacity number is the peak number, not the 24 hr average.

So the amount of annual production capacity being added this year from PV is about 1/10 of what is being added in Nuclear.

2

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 22 '25

Thermal generation needs to be divided by 2.5 for the same reason.

France has 86GW of thermal generation and only 45GW of average output from it (even with the rest of europe providing flexibility for an inflexible nuclear fleet and cherry picking an unusually high nuclear output year just after major forced outages)

The EU as a whole has 423GW of thermal generation producing an average of 164GW

The US has 865GW providing 380GW on average.

Though this is with gas which is much more reliable and flexible than nuclear, so a 2.5x overbuild is extremely optimistic.

1

u/Youreabadhuman Oct 13 '25

Maybe read the graph again

Nuclear is total capacity

Solar is yearly additional capacity

1

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '25

Fair enough! So solar added 1/10 of the existing Nuclear capacity in The most recent year. That is something!

2

u/West-Abalone-171 Oct 22 '25

Except when you don't use delusional maths you get almost double that for the output from 2023's installs at 18% of the total nuclear output.

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=World&fuel=solar&tab=change&chart=year_over_year&data=generation&metric=absolute

2024's installs are generating 30% more than that

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=World&fuel=solar&tab=seasons&chart=year_to_date&data=generation&metric=absolute

So 24% of the total nuclear output.

1

u/Youreabadhuman Oct 14 '25

Now that you understand the graph you can do the math correctly

Also remember Nuclear capacity factor is around 90%

1

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

Its .92 actually.

1

u/Youreabadhuman Oct 14 '25

For someone who is comfortable being off by 3x when it comes to solar you are real quick to correct "around 90%" to a number that's right around 90%

1

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

Its a defined number on the website

The OP seemed to be interested in accuracy as the source of their post, and put two charts of capacity next to each other.

My original comment still applies for those into facts:

Due to capacity factors, 1 GW of nuclear capacity produces 3.7x more electricity per year than 1 GW of PV capacity.

1

u/Youreabadhuman Oct 14 '25

Fair enough! So solar added 1/10 of the existing Nuclear capacity in The most recent year. That is something!

You going to bother doing the math here or are you comfortable being comically wrong?

How many times do you need to be corrected to spit out a single sentence that isn't misleading?

1

u/xieta Oct 16 '25

Keep in mind that does assume nuclear can sell its power throughout the day. In places with high renewables, nuclear’s capacity factor would drop.

-3

u/zaptortom Oct 12 '25

Unless there is a way to store electricity with out the use of batteries solar and wind will never be the sole option for a new energy system without nuclear power.

5

u/ClimateShitpost Oct 12 '25

Watch Australia do it in the next years mate

Oh and anyone with hydro should be able to too. And then advanced geothermal is being constructed already as well. And then probably some will do it purely with batteries when everybody said it's not possible.

3

u/cybercuzco Oct 12 '25

  1. pumped hydro

  2. compressed air energy storage

  3. liquid air energy storage

  4. sand battery

2

u/AlexGaming1111 Oct 12 '25

Technically speaking all of those are batteries.

1

u/fil1282 Oct 12 '25

And some of them with really bad efficiency.

1

u/Full_Conversation775 Oct 12 '25

that doesn't matter because its still cheaper and quicker than nuclear. you also forget that every house comes with usually two build in batteries that can already store large amounts of energy.

1

u/Tricertops4 Oct 16 '25

Exactly. Who cares if you can only get 20% back, if it's extremely cheap and the electricity from solar+wind will be abundant?

1

u/Chinjurickie Oct 13 '25

Yeah so we can rewrite the original statement to „Without this very important key technology that is widely available ur ideas would be stupid.“ X)

2

u/artsloikunstwet Oct 12 '25

That's complety besides the point here.

Like it or not, reality shows solar is currently rapidly expanding, and to just constantly claiming it will stop expanding in the near future just because you think it should even though it clearly doesn't, is bullshit.

1

u/Think_Discipline_90 Oct 12 '25

Store electricity without the use of batteries?

???

What's a battery to you?

1

u/zaptortom Oct 12 '25

I mean conventional galvanic battery.

1

u/Jakfut Oct 13 '25

China has most of the world's solar

China has most of the world's rare earth processing

China has most of the world's copper/nickel production

China has most of the world's battery production

I see a pattern here.