Bounding US electricity demand in 2050

Limiting climate change requires a radical shift in energy supply and use. Because of time lags in capital investments, the political process, and the climate system, potential developments decades from now must be considered for energy policy decisions today. Traditionally, scenario analysis and forecasting are used to conceptualize the future; however, past energy demand forecasts have performed poorly displaying overconfidence, or a tendency to overly discount the tails of a distribution of possibilities under uncertainty. This study demonstrates a simple analytical approach to bound US electricity demand in 2050. Long-term electricity demand is parsed into two terms — an expected, or “business-as-usual,” term and a “new demand” term estimated explicitly to account for possible technological changes in response to climate change. Under a variety of aggressive adaptation and mitigation conditions, low or high growth in GDP, and modest or substantial improvements in energy intensity, US electricity demand could be as little as 3100TWh or as much as 17,000TWh in 2050. Electrification of the US transportation sector could introduce the largest share of new electricity demand. Projections for expected electricity demand are most sensitive to assumptions about the rate of reduction of US electricity intensity per unit GDP. •We demonstrate a simple analytical approach for projecting long-term energy demand.•We explicitly investigate technological changes in response to climate change.•Under various climate policies, US electricity demand could range from 3.1–17PWh in 2050.•Electrification of US transportation introduces the most new electricity demand.•Assumptions for electricity intensity reductions highly influence the projections.