nuclear-news

How the IEA is grossly biased against renewables – the IEA should be scrapped

David Toke, Mar 11, 2025

The International Energy Agency (the IEA) is hopelessly biased against renewable energy both in terms of the projections of future energy development it has made and also in the way it frames the statistics about energy supply. The statistical methods used by the IEA favour fossil fuels and nuclear power. The IEA does not give sufficient attention to energy efficiency. These things can be illustrated by reference to analysis of its past energy projections and also by analysing the way it counts energy statistics. The question that must be posed, is what is the point of the IEA if it gets things so badly wrong…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Conclusion

The way that the IEA compiles its statistics is grossly biased against renewable energy and in favour of fossil fuels and nuclear power. Its future energy projections have been abysmal, and this failure illustrates its appalling bias. The IEA’s approach also obscures the impact of energy transition which will involve increasing dominance by electric-battery and heat pump technologies. The IEA fails to give priority to energy efficiency. Rather it tends to talk more about absolute increases in energy consumption, such as in data centres (for example see HERE).

Yet such notions of accelerated absolute increases in energy consumption have already proved to be overblown. This is demonstrated by China’s DeepSeek AI project which is being powered by a small fraction of the energy consumption of earlier AI projects (See HERE). The IEA is also keen on pushing nuclear power fantasies, including small modular reactors (see HERE).

In general the IEA tends to talk about energy security rather than energy transition, as can be seem in the executive summary of its 2024 World Energy Energy Outlook (see HERE). Yet energy transition will implicitly give us energy security. It will do through the replacement of of insecure and volatile fossil fuel supplies with renewable energy and electrically based energy efficient technologies.

The key to understand this is that the IEA is not independent in focus or finance. The IEA is financed by a collection of mostly western governments. We should remember that the IEA was formed to, in effect, help western countries cope with the fact that the western based oil companies lost control of oil markets after 1973. The Secretariat is based in nuclear-dominated France. The information it gives is seriously flawed.

The conditions which led to the IEA’s formation have fundamentally changed. Our biggest challenge now is energy transition and the climate struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The IEA’s projections are wholly unreliable and its statistics give a false impression of what is happening.

The main energy trade groups already have their own trade associations – eg IRENA for renewables, the WNA for nuclear, and we know that the oil and gas companies look after themselves. The IEA serves no useful purpose. It needs to be scrapped. A new intergovernmental organisation could be created, to which the IEA staff could be redeployed, with a mission of promoting energy efficiency technologies. https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/how-the-iea-is-grossly-biased-against

March 14, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | ENERGY