EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook is a projection, not a prediction
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=26272
The U.S. Energy Information Administration provides a long-term outlook for energy supply, demand, and prices in its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO). This outlook is centered on the Reference case, which is not a prediction of what will happen, but rather a modeled projection of what might happen given certain assumptions and methodologies. Today, EIA released an annotated summary of the AEO2016 Reference Case—which includes the Clean Power Plan—and a side case without the Clean Power Plan.
The AEO is developed using EIA's National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), an integrated model that seeks to reflect how various drivers of the U.S. economy and the different components of energy production and use will interact to determine energy supply, demand, and prices.
The Reference case, which incorporates only existing laws and policies, is not intended to be a most likely prediction of the future. EIA's approach to addressing the inherent uncertainty surrounding the country's energy future is to develop multiple cases that reflect different sets of internally consistent assumptions about key sources of uncertainty such as future world oil prices, macroeconomic growth, energy resources, technology costs, and policies.
The alternative cases in the report show the model's sensitivity to different assumptions, which EIA updates and publishes each year. The assumptions that inform the modeling play an important role, and any results should be interpreted with the underlying assumptions in mind.
