The Future Of World Energy Supply 2024 2050 Charted

See more visuals like this on the Voronoi app. See visuals like this from many other data creators on our Voronoi app. Download it for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources. The world’s energy system is undergoing its most significant transition in modern history. While demand continues to rise, the types of energy supplying that demand are shifting at an accelerating pace. This chart highlights how global energy supply evolves from 2024 to 2050, showing which sources grow, plateau, or decline.

The data for this visualization comes from the IEA World Energy Outlook 2025. It outlines global energy supply in exajoules (EJ) from 2024 through forecasts for 2035 and 2050. Renewables more than double from 83 EJ in 2024 to 233 EJ by 2050, rising from 13% to 31% of global supply. Solar and wind make up most of this increase, with solar alone growing nearly ninefold over the forecast period. Hydro continues to rise more gradually. By 2050, renewables represent the largest source of net new global energy.

The world’s energy system is undergoing its most significant transition in modern history. While demand continues to rise, the types of energy supplying that demand are shifting at an accelerating pace. This chart highlights how global energy supply evolves from 2024 to 2050, showing which sources grow, plateau, or decline. The data for this visualization comes from the IEA World Energy Outlook 2025. It outlines global energy supply in exajoules (EJ) from 2024 through forecasts for 2035 and 2050. Renewables more than double from 83 EJ in 2024 to 233 EJ by 2050, rising from 13% to 31% of global supply.

Solar and wind make up most of this increase, with solar alone growing nearly ninefold over the forecast period. Hydro continues to rise more gradually. By 2050, renewables represent the largest source of net new global energy. Coal shows the steepest drop, falling from 178 EJ in 2024 to just 95 EJ by 2050. This reflects both policy-driven phase-downs and competitive pressure from clean technologies. Nuclear grows steadily from 31 EJ in 2024 to 61 EJ in 2050, maintaining a small but meaningful role in global baseload power.

Traditional biomass declines as regions transition to modern energy systems. Meanwhile, “other” renewables—such as geothermal and modern bioenergy—expand significantly, helping diversify the low-carbon supply portfolio. With ShareProphets’ membership, you receive: • Access to all the entire nearly 10 year archive By Darren Atwater | Sunday 30 November 2025 The world’s energy system is undergoing its most significant transition in modern history.

While demand continues to rise, the types of energy supplying that demand are shifting at an accelerating pace. This chart highlights how global energy supply evolves from 2024 to 2050, showing which sources grow, plateau, or decline. Join us for free and gain access to three articles per month Learn how we engage with policy makers to ensure safe, reliable, and affordable energy for the future as demand continues to grow. API's Energy Insights Hub provides updated statistics, data visualizations, timely analysis, and in-depth reports on all aspects of the oil and natural gas industry. API’s Global Industry Services drives safety and efficiency within the oil and gas industry through standards, certifications, assessments, training and more.

Global energy demand climbed to a record high in 2024. Energy Institute data shows consumption levels for all major energy sources reached record levels in 2024, including oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydroelectricity, solar, wind, biofuels, and other renewables. This is the first time this has happened concurrently across all major energy sources since 2006. Oil remains the world’s largest energy source, meeting 34% of global demand. Global energy demand rose by 12 EJ (2%) year-on-year with China and India accounting for nearly 50% of the growth. Meanwhile, natural gas grew the most of the energy sources, accounting for a third of the total increase.

!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}})}(); !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}})}(); RFF’s annual Global Energy Outlook harmonizes a range of long-term energy projections to find key trends in global energy consumption, emissions, and geopolitics. Daniel Raimi, Yuqi Zhu, Richard G. Newell, and Brian C. Prest Click here to explore the interactive Global Energy Outlook data tool.

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.

The IEA’s flagship World Energy Outlook (WEO) is the most authoritative source of global energy analysis and projections. Updated annually to reflect the latest energy data, technology and market trends, and government policies, it explores a range of possible energy futures and their implications for energy security, access and emissions. The WEO covers the whole energy system, using a scenario-based approach to highlight the central choices, consequences and contingencies that lie ahead. It includes exploratory scenarios that flow from different assumptions about existing policies, as well as normative pathways that achieve energy and emissions goals in full. The multi-scenario approach illustrates how the course of the energy system might be affected by changing key variables, including the energy policies adopted by governments around the world. This year’s edition comes amid major shifts in global energy policies and markets, and acute geopolitical strains.

Governments are reaching different conclusions about the best ways to tackle concerns about energy security, affordability and sustainability. As always, the World Energy Outlook provides unrivalled insights into the consequences of different energy policy and investment choices. An important theme in this year’s WEO is security of supply of critical minerals.

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