For the first time since 2023, the Energy Information Administration this week released its annual energy outlook. The office, which falls within the Department of Energy’s purview, is reportedly set to lose over 100 employees amid the Trump administration’s federal workforce cuts — so for many of the office’s staff, the long-awaited outlook release was their final act.
It’s the first such report released in two years, as EIA paused publication last year to update its modeling system. And it is an abridged version, without its usual in-depth market analysis.
Joseph DeCarolis, the former EIA administrator during the previous administration, noted on the social media platform Bluesky that the outlook was published “under difficult circumstances,” and that because the office “is subject to the same churn happening across the federal government,” it “was reduced to a short introductory narrative and a full set of data tables — but no figures or results narrative.”
Additionally, most of the report’s projections, the “reference case,” are based on the regulatory environment as it was in December 2024. The model doesn’t account for the dramatic policy changes happening under the Trump administration.
That said, EIA finds that U.S. electricity generation is expected to increase by around 50% by 2050, from roughly 4,000 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 6,000 TWh in 2050. Electricity prices are also predicted to increase from 13 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2024, to more than 20 cents per KWh by 2050.
Renewable generation is projected to rise significantly, from around 1,000 TWh in 2025 to over 4,000 TWh in 2050. That’s quite a jump compared to the office’s predictions in 2023, when renewable generation was expected to increase to a little over 3,000 TWh in 2050.
In the EIA reference case coal-fired electricity generation is expected to nearly disappear entirely by 2034.
But the alternative electricity scenario maps more closely to the policies expected from the Trump administration; it assumes the removal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2024 rules regulating carbon dioxide emissions from gas, coal, and oil (Section 111 under the Clean Air Act). In that case, coal generation is projected to level off at around 200 TWh per year in 2040, after declining sharply over the next ten years. And gas-fired generation is projected to steadily decline in the near-term, and then stall at around 1,000 TWh from 2040 onwards.
Under the reference case, carbon dioxide emissions from energy are expected to be 17% lower in 2050 than in the EIA reference scenario for 2023, which DeCarolis attributes largely to the Inflation Reduction Act, EPA regulations, and dropping costs for renewables and batteries. However, “emissions tend to flat-line around 2040 as IRA credits expire and growing energy demands exert influence,” he wrote.
Together, the findings suggest a continued — if slower — energy transition, even if the Trump administration succeeds in its goal to repeal, or at least significantly reduce, the IRA.
That’s consistent with BloombergNEF’s latest New Energy Outlook report, which maps how the energy transition would likely proceed “in a world where investment decisions are driven primarily by the need to meet rising energy demand with a cost-competitive mix of technologies — not by climate concerns.”
‘Difficult circumstances’
The Trump DOE did not like its own findings. In a statement released on the same day as the EIA annual outlook, agency spokesperson Andrea Woods said that the report “reflects the disastrous path for American energy production under the Biden administration,” and that it “reflects the consequences of the Biden administration’s short-sighted energy policies.”
This critique comes amidst the massive federal force cuts that have hit the DOE hard. At EIA alone, over 40% of the workforce has left or accepted buyouts since January, according to reporting by Reuters. After the latest round of resignation offers, which came in the last two weeks, over 100 employees are set to leave.
The remaining staffers are reportedly assessing which of the office’s reports they will be able to keep releasing in the future. In the meantime, on the EIA website, the release date for the next annual energy outlook is “TBD.”
