Global Energy Outlook 2024: Peaks or Plateaus?

The future of the global energy system is deeply uncertain, and the choices that are made in the coming years will have enormous consequences for the future of the climate and, indeed, human civilization. To understand how our energy system is changing, each year a variety of organizations produce long-term projections that imagine a wide range of futures based on divergent visions about policies, technologies, prices, and geopolitics.Because these projections vary widely and depend heavily on their varied assumptions and methodologies, they are difficult to compare on an apples-to-apples basis. In this report, we apply a detailed harmonization process to compare 16 scenarios across eight energy outlooks published in 2023, as well as two historical data sources. Taken together, these scenarios offer a broad scope of potential changes to the energy system as envisioned by some of its most knowledgeable organizations. Table 1 lists the historical datasets, outlooks, and scenarios examined here, and additional detail is provided in Section 4.