As 2025 unfolds, the global economy, international alliances, and the rules-based international order face new questions and challenges. Energy markets and international climate negotiations are not immune to this turmoil and may undergo profound change as global markets and geopolitical dynamics adapt to new realities. Amid deep uncertainty on these and many other fronts, the world continues to face the enormous and pressing challenge of transforming its energy system to address global climate change.
To understand how our energy system is evolving and how it needs to change to reach net-zero emissions, each year, a variety of organizations produce projections that imagine a wide range of futures based on divergent visions about policies, technologies, prices, and geopolitics. Because these vary widely and depend heavily on varied assumptions and methodologies, they are difficult to compare on an applesto-apples basis. In this report, we apply a detailed harmonization process to compare 13 scenarios across seven energy outlooks published in 2024 (and 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 shows the historical datasets, outlooks, and scenarios, with additional detail provided in Section 4.