ENERGY FOR A SUSTAINABLE WORLD - World Resources Institute

III. Alternative Energy Futures
The energy price shocks of the 1970s
prompted a number of institutions,
both national and international, and
scientists to project future energy demand and
supply. In most of these projections, the
energy future is portrayed as an extension of
the past: energy demand is seen to rise steeply,
so that virtually all energy supplies must be
expanded at formidable rates to meet projected
demand. Most have underestimated the potential
of measures to increase energy efficiency,
probably because the world had never before
experienced anything remotely like the changes
relating to energy that have occurred since the
first oil shock.
What is striking about these efforts is that as
time passed, the demand projections came
down. For example, the International Energy
Agency's demand projections dropped markedly
between 1977 and 1980. (See Figure 11.)
Energy demand projections for the United
States also moved steadily downward. (See
Figure 13.) The first effort exploring the prospects
for energy efficiency improvement was
the Ford Foundation's Energy Policy Project
(EPP). In its final report, published in 1974,
EPP suggested that "zero energy growth" for
the United States was a possibility near the
turn of the century, so that by the year 2000
demand would be "only" about 100 quads
(quadrillion British thermal units [Btu]) per
year. 11 This suggestion was roundly criticized
at the time as "fuzzyheaded," "irresponsible,"
and "totally impractical" by a number of experts,
including several on the project's board
of advisors. In fact, it was then virtually impossible
to find any energy analyst outside the
Energy Policy Project who thought U.S. energy
demand could be as low as 100 quads per year
in the year 2000. Government agencies and the
trade associations for the oil and gas, electric
utility, and nuclear power industries were projecting
energy demands of 150 to 170 quads by
2000. It was not long, however, before the
Ford Project's middle-of-the-road "technical
fix" scenario of 125 quads was adopted by
energy analysts as conventional wisdom. The
United States has already experienced zero
energy growth for the period 1973 to 1985, and
today most forecasters project a U.S. energy
demand in 2000 of only 85 to 90 quads per
year.
Why did analysts err on the high side? The
most serious problem with these projections is
that most were based on the assumption that
in the future there would be a close coupling
between a nation's energy demand and its
level of economic activity, as measured by its
GDP or gross national product (GNP). This
correlation was indeed strong historically, but
no more in the market-oriented industrialized
countries. As we have already noted, a remarkable
decoupling of energy and economic
growth has already been seen for the OECD
countries since 1973. (See Figure 14.)
Certainly the most ambitious analysis of the
global energy problem in this period, published
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