Yesterday, the US Energy Information Administration released its energy outlook for 2017. These annual reports provide projections of current energy trends out to 2040, and they provide policymakers with a sense of where the country could be decades from now, should things continue as they have been.

Anyone who's up on current trends wouldn't be surprised by many of the EIA's results. With coal's continued decline, natural gas becomes the dominant source of energy in the US, followed by renewable generation. Most of the scenarios the report considers see the continued growth in US energy production far outstripping a sluggish growth in demand. This pattern will transform the country into a net exporter of energy by the 2030s.

But EIA reports are notoriously conservative in their projections, and this can lead to completely unrealistic results. In the past, for example, the EIA's projections didn't foresee the radical drop in photovoltaic prices, and so the organization had solar playing little role in US energy markets. This year's version is no exception, as it suggests installation of wind power in the US will essentially stop once tax incentives run out in the early 2020s.

If the EIA's reports are unrealistic, why bother? Well, they have a number of useful purposes. For example, this year's report examines what might happen with and without Obama's Clean Power Plan and projects what might happen if oil and gas exploration run up against technological or policy issues that keep the current extraction boom from continuing indefinitely. In addition, the report helps gauge the effect of current policies; if policies create an energy economy that's in some way deficient, then we can give serious consideration to how to change the policy environment.

So, what does the EIA foresee? In keeping with recent trends, demand is largely flat, only rising slightly after the 2030s due to economic and population growth. Energy production largely follows a similar path, except in two scenarios. In one, high oil prices drive expanded domestic production; in the second, continued improvements in oil and gas extraction technology make the US a major exporter of energy. In fact, most scenarios see the US becoming a net exporter of energy in the 2020s. The exceptional scenarios involve continued low oil prices or slow improvements in the technology used to locate and extract oil and gas.

Carbon emissions generally track with energy production, declining slightly before inching upward in the 2030s. An exception is a scenario in which the Clean Power Plan never happens. There, emissions stay flat throughout the period. That is again a conservative projection; emissions have dropped by an average annual rate of 1.4 percent in the last decade, but the EIA only projects them to fall at 0.2 percent annually going forward. Last year saw transportation become the largest source of emissions in the US for the first time, displacing electricity generation. As the use of coal on the grid continues to drop, that doesn't change through the 2040s.

When the report comes to individual sources of energy, natural gas is the big story. It only just passed coal to become the largest single source in 2010, but the EIA sees continued growth that will leave it at nearly twice the level of its closest competitor. That competitor is petroleum, which is expected to see production that's largely flat across this period. Nuclear and hydro largely stay stable, but coal, once the dominant domestic source of energy production, is pushed to fourth late in the 2030s by the steady rise of renewables (some of that coal is exported). Although coal production has seen a precipitous drop over the last decade, the EIA predicts that its decline will slow dramatically and even stabilize if the Clean Power Plan is terminated.

The rise of renewables actually outstrips that of gas on a percentage basis. And, should there be any hiccups in our ability to extract more gas, renewables will become the single largest source of electricity on the grid in the 2030s. The EIA is clearly optimistic about solar and predicts large and continuous growth. That growth takes place through both grid-scale installations and distributed hardware, like rooftop solar. While large-scale installations will remain the largest source of solar power, distributed hardware matches its trajectory closely throughout the entire period and will reach 100GW of installed capacity by 2040.

But the report is weirdly pessimistic about wind. As shown in one of the graphs above, wind installations continue to grow dramatically up until the federal tax incentives for them run out in 2022. Then, the growth in wind essentially stops. This is odd considering that wind is now one of the cheapest sources of electricity in the US. The EIA explains this as follows: "While many wind projects would be economic without the tax credits, most of the profitable wind capacity will be added to take advantage of the tax credits prior to their expiration." In essence, we'll tap out all the good sites in a tax-break-fueled binge now. This assumes that improving technology doesn't make any additional sites economically viable and that the companies that participated in the binge would allow all their manufacturing and installation capacity to sit idle.

Aside from its debatable take on wind, is there anything else that the report is obviously missing? It's hard to say the EIA's take on policy incentives is unrealistic, considering that national directives are likely to remain in turmoil through at least the end of the decade, and so energy policy will probably driven by a patchwork of state initiatives.

As mentioned above, the EIA is bad at predicting changes in technology. And if there's one technology that seems poised for a revolution, it's electric vehicles. Here, the EIA projects a rapid growth until 2025, after which it slows dramatically. If the rise of growth in electric vehicles continues beyond 2025, then it wouldn't just take a big bite out of the US' single biggest source of carbon emissions; it would shift the energy source to the power grid, where emissions are dropping the fastest.