IEA accused of "deliberately" undermining global renewables industry

The International Energy Agency has been accused of deliberately delaying the shift to a low carbon economy and systematically underestimating the energy that can be generated from renewable sources as a result of its on-going ties to the oil, gas and nuclear industries.

That is the stark conclusion of a new report released last week by the Energy Watch Group, a coalition of scientists and politicians set up to analyse official energy industry predictions, which said that the IEA was guilty of institutional bias towards traditional sources of energy and using "misleading" data to undermine the case for alternative sources of energy, such as wind and solar.

The report compares the IEA's previous projections about the growth of wind capacity and finds that it has consistently underestimated the amount of energy the wind industry can deliver.

For example, in 1998, the IEA predicted global wind electricity generation would total 47.4GW by 2020, but Energy Watch's report said this level was reached by the end of 2004. The report also said that the IEA has not learnt the lesson of previous underestimates, and last year net additions of wind power globally were four times greater than the average IEA estimate from its 1995-2004 predictions.

It adds that based on current growth rates wind and solar energy could actually account for 50 per cent of the world's energy mix by 2025.

The report concludes that the IEA's predictions for wind energy "were neither empirically nor theoretically based" and argues that the systematic underestimating of the wind industry's success is a result of the Agency's close links to traditional energy industries.

"The IEA outlook remains attached to oil, gas, coal and nuclear, and renewables seem to have no chance to reverse this trend," it says. "This organisation… has been deploying misleading data on renewables for many years [and is still doing so]… One has to ask if the ignorance and contempt of IEA toward wind power and renewables in general is done within a structure of intent."

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, Rudolf Rechsteiner ,report author and Swiss MP, said that as well as underestimating the role renewables can play the IEA also over-stated the availability of fossil fuels. "The numbers speak for themselves, " he said. "They overestimate all the time the availability of oil and as a result they completely failed to predict the current oil price volatility."

He added that while the global renewable energy industry had continued to record exponential growth in recent years the lack of support from the IEA was making it difficult to establish renewables as a mainstream energy source. "The fact the IEAs predictions were so badly underestimated means that much of the auxiliary infrastructure that starts with improvements to the grid and energy storage capacity is now missing," he said.

The founder of the Energy Watch Group, German MP Hans-Josef Fell, said there was no doubt that the IEA was deliberately attempting to hamper the development of the renewable energy sector.

"The permanent overestimation of the availability of conventional energies and the underestimation of the renewable energy possibilities is a deliberate method to hedge ever increasing profits for the conventional energy sector," he said. "The disregard of renewable energy possibilities, despite – meanwhile – vast positive experiences, is at the origin of a lack of political actions for renewable energies by politicians. The classic example is the recently settled target of 20 per cent renewable energies until 2020 by the European Union. So far the growth patterns lead us to expect a significantly higher share until 2020, even without increased political support."

One wind industry insider, who asked to remain anonymous, said that the allegation that the IEA is biased in favour of fossil fuel industries should be investigated immediately. "What we do know is that it is consistently getting projections for the industry badly wrong and at the very least there should be a shake up of its forecasting department," the insider said.

He added that the scale of the IEAs influence meant any suggestion of bias needed to be treated seriously by the governments who use its figures. " Politicians and civil servants name check the IEAs figures all the time and use them to justify policies, so if there are grounds to these allegations it needs to be investigated," he said.

The IEA declined to comment on the report. However, over the past year it has sought to signal its support for the renewable energy industry and only last month at the UN's climate change conference in Poznan IEA executive director Nobuo Tanaka called for a global "Clean Energy New Deal" designed to deliver a huge increase in renewables investment.