PrintUnderstanding An Outlook
In order to help you understand how to review/analyze these outlooks, we’re going to take a look at one together. We chose the EIA outlook because it is probably one of the more comprehensive options, is relatively “neutral” in terms of possible biases, and has some excellent navigation and interactive features.
Go to the link for the EIA. You see on the landing page a layout of how to access information. As you scroll down the webpage, you will note that there are several options for how the information is presented. What EIA has done is divide the full report into many sub-publications that focus on specific aspects. The landing page also provides quick access information such as key takeaways and supporting information as well as a link to download the most recent outlook report.
LEARNING POINT 1:
Understand the overall layout and structure of the outlook.
As to the linked documents, they provide reports on energy supply sectors such as petroleum, natural gas, and electricity. EIA also provides reports by user sector, such as industrial, residential, and transportation. Finally, they provide supporting information such as related emissions data.
LEARNING POINT 2:
Understand how the information is sorted and presented.
Open the full report by scrolling down to the "Narrative" section and open the link "Read the full narrative." In the Foreward and Executive Summary the refernce case and side cases are discussed. This is very important information that explains how EIA developed their projections, what assumptions they use, and how things could be different. This type of information is critical to know when using any outlook because it puts the data into context.
LEARNING POINT 3:
Make sure to have some understanding of how the projections were developed in terms of sources of information and assumptions made.
Realizing that it is likely different outlooks might show different trends, it is important to recognize why that may be.
Finally, on the main page click on the "Interactive" icon under the "Data Tables - Reference Case Tables" header. Arguably, this is one the best features of this outlook, and I think makes EIA one of the better sources. I would recommend you “play around” with this interactive viewer. You will note several drop-down menu tabs where you can select many different variations of the information and see how the trends vary going into the future. The Publications Tables tab will let you pick an outlook year, and the Scenarios tab will let you pick the assumptions case, for example the aforementioned Reference Case. You will also see options for the various side cases. The Regions tab lets you see trends by geographic region. There are also tabs to show information either as a curve or on a map. The Map tab is particularly interesting in that you can run it as a time lapse animation to see how information changes. We will come back to this interactive Table Viewer in the next lesson where we explore the actual data.
This short tour through the EIA Outlook gives you a general sense of the kinds of information presented in outlooks.
Considerations:
I mentioned the terms alternate cases, sectors, and fuel types. It is easy to get confused as to what they all mean and why some outlooks are sorted one way, but others use a different format. It is all about the story they are trying to tell. For example, you may see energy demand sorted by user sector. These can include industrial, municipal/public, or commercial. Some even further subdivide industrial into types of industry. Sorting by user sector gives the reader of the outlook a sense of how our energy resources are shared among users. It also gives a sense of where the greatest demand is or is projected to be.
Another way to sort is by “energy sector,” or supply type. This type of sorting is used to demonstrate supply and tells us how much of each type is available and projected to be available in the future. In Lesson 3, we will take advantage of these sorting options to draw conclusions about projected supply and demand.
Particularly, but especially in the EIA outlook, they refer to alternate cases. As you can imagine, energy supply and demand in the future will be very dependent on many variables such as population growth, economic development, and policy decisions, among others. Clearly, no one can totally and accurately predict these variables, so in order to make projections, certain assumptions are made. Alternate cases are projections using other assumptions for certain variables. You are encouraged to explore some alternate cases in terms of which ones are used in the outlooks you explore. In Lesson 3, we will drill deeper into what the differences in results are between cases.