The World Energy Outlook is the IEA’s flagship annual projection, built not as a forecast but as a set of scenarios for where energy choices lead. The 2025 edition declares the arrival of an “Age of Electricity,” with power demand pulled upward by air conditioning, electric vehicles and, newly, artificial intelligence. It also revisits the goal that anchors SDG 7: universal access to modern energy, still out of reach on current trends.
The headline
Electricity now grows much faster than overall energy use in every scenario, rising by around 40% to 2035 in the two policy-based scenarios and by more than 50% in the net-zero pathway. Renewables, led by solar, expand faster than any other source, and nuclear is staging a comeback. Yet the outlook is blunt that the world is not on track to close the access gap: around 730 million people still live without electricity, and nearly 2 billion, a quarter of humanity, cook with fuels that harm their health. A new IEA scenario maps a country-by-country route to universal access, but only by 2035 for electricity and 2040 for clean cooking, well past the 2030 deadline.
The numbers
- Three main scenarios. The Current Policies Scenario (CPS), the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), and Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE), plus a new normative ACCESS scenario for universal energy access.
- Electricity demand. Rises around 40% to 2035 in both the CPS and STEPS, and by more than 50% in the NZE Scenario; electricity is still only 21% of total final consumption today.
- AI and data centres. Data centre investment is expected to reach USD 580 billion in 2025, above the USD 540 billion spent on global oil supply; a tripling of data centre electricity use by 2035 is less than 10% of total demand growth, but more than 85% of new capacity is in the United States, China and the EU.
- Renewables build-out. Solar PV additions run at roughly 540 GW a year to 2035 in the CPS; China accounts for 45–60% of global renewables deployment over the next decade.
- Grids lag generation. Battery storage additions topped 75 GW in 2024, but annual grid spending, about USD 400 billion, is less than half the USD 1 trillion going into generation.
- The access gap. Around 730 million people without electricity and nearly 2 billion without clean cooking; in the ACCESS scenario an average of 80 million people gain electricity each year to 2035.
- Emissions and warming. Energy-related CO2 hit a record 38 Gt in 2024; the STEPS points to about 2.5 °C of warming by 2100 and the CPS to almost 3 °C.
The counting angle
The headline access figure is itself contested. The WEO counts around 730 million people without electricity, while the five-agency Tracking SDG 7 report puts the 2024 figure closer to 655 million. Same target, same year, different datasets and methods. The outlook also changes what future gets measured: this edition drops the Announced Pledges Scenario, which had tracked whether national climate pledges were met, and adds the ACCESS pathway instead. And a household-connection metric, the basis of SDG 7.1, says nothing about whether that connection powers a shop, a clinic or an irrigation pump, which is why the report devotes a section to “moving beyond access.”
Watch & read
- World Energy Outlook 2025, the full report (IEA).
- Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report 2026, the official SDG 7 scorecard from the five custodian agencies.
Figures are as reported by the IEA in the World Energy Outlook 2025 executive summary; scenario ranges are the report’s own estimates and none of the scenarios is a forecast. The differing electricity-access count is drawn from the separate Tracking SDG 7 report.