Energy & Resource Futures

— the scenarios and cost curves, in plain language

Energy planning uses named scenarios — not predictions — and different institutions openly disagree about what they show. This page reports those scenarios, the real cost trends behind them, and Ontario’s own grid, with a date on every figure.

What’s actually happening

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says so itself: “None of the scenarios in the World Energy Outlook are a forecast.” Its 2025 edition (published November 12, 2025) uses three: a “Stated Policies” scenario reflecting current direction of travel, a “Current Policies” scenario reflecting only what’s already law, and a “Net Zero by 2050” scenario built backward from limiting warming to 1.5°C. The IEA dropped its long-running “Announced Pledges” scenario from this edition, citing incomplete national climate pledges; reporting has also documented a U.S. government funding-pressure campaign around the agency’s methods ahead of this release — a real, sourced tension named here, not resolved.

OPEC and the IEA openly disagree on how much oil the world will use. OPEC’s own outlook (November 12, 2025) projects total liquids demand of just under 123 million barrels a day by 2050 and explicitly rejects the idea that oil demand will ever peak. The IEA’s current-policies figure for the same year, 113 million barrels a day, has moved closer to OPEC’s — but the IEA’s own central scenario still shows demand flattening around 2030, something OPEC’s framework denies will happen at all. As of an August 2025 snapshot, the two organizations’ estimates for 2025 demand growth alone differed by roughly 610,000 barrels a day.

Renewable energy costs have fallen sharply for over a decade, but the newest single year of data runs against that trend and is worth watching rather than smoothing over. Solar panel prices have fallen roughly 20% every time global installed capacity has doubled, and solar costs fell about 90% over the decade to 2024 (Our World in Data). Lazard’s widely used annual cost report found unsubsidized utility-scale solar in the U.S. at $38–78 per megawatt-hour in its 2025 edition (June 2025) — an 84% reduction since Lazard’s 2009 baseline. Lazard’s 2026 edition (published July 13, 2026) moved that figure up, to roughly $40–98 per megawatt-hour, with onshore wind rising to $37–99 — the first broad-based rise in Lazard’s tracked renewable costs in years (one caveat: trade outlets disagree about the prior-year comparison basis for solar — $38–78 versus $38–92 for 2025 — so the size of the rise depends on which comparator you take; both are linked in the receipts). The multi-decade decline story remains real; this newest data point does not fit it.

Electric vehicles kept growing: global sales rose 20% to exceed 20 million units in 2025, about a quarter of all new cars sold worldwide, with the IEA projecting 23 million for 2026. Grid-scale battery storage deployment reached roughly 108–112 gigawatts worldwide in 2025 (two credible trackers, IEA and BloombergNEF, give figures that close but not identical) — about 11 times the installed base of 2021.

Where credible people think it’s heading

Ontario Power Generation is building the first grid-scale small modular nuclear reactor in a G7 country, at Darlington. OPG’s own plan is to complete construction of the first unit by the end of this decade and connect it to the grid by the end of 2030, at a cost of roughly $6.1 billion for the first unit and $20.9 billion for all four planned units. An independent analysis by the Pembina Institute (November 2025) notes that nuclear megaprojects worldwide have, over the past six years, averaged roughly six years late and double their initial cost estimate — and, stating this explicitly as an illustration rather than a prediction, models what that pattern would mean for Darlington: completion nearer 2042 than OPG’s 2036 four-unit target, and a cost exceeding $40 billion. The clearest real-world cautionary case: Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear plant in the U.S. was estimated in 2009 at roughly $14 billion; its actual final cost came in at $36 billion, over a 15-year construction schedule.

Private investment in nuclear fusion keeps growing — $14.24 billion cumulative since 2021, including a record $4.48 billion in the twelve months to July 2026 — and 71% of surveyed fusion companies still expect the first commercial fusion-electricity plant sometime in the 2030s. But the field’s own timelines keep slipping too: the international ITER project’s first-plasma target has moved from 2025 to 2034, with full operation now pushed to 2039.

What’s honestly uncertain

Whether Darlington follows the cost-and-schedule pattern Pembina models, or beats it, will not be knowable for years. Global hydrogen production remains overwhelmingly fossil-fuel-based today; the IEA cut its own 2030 estimate for low-emissions hydrogen capacity by nearly a quarter within a single year, and states plainly that “actual production capacity could be much lower” than announced project totals suggest. China’s dominant control of critical minerals used in the energy transition — refining roughly 91% of the world’s rare-earth output — has led to escalating export controls through 2025 and 2026, an ongoing, live situation.

Why it matters for Toronto

Ontario’s electricity supply mix, as of a June 8, 2026 regulator disclosure, was 46.2% nuclear, 22.5% hydro, 19.4% natural gas and other fossil sources, 9.3% wind, and 2.1% solar. Ontario’s grid operator, IESO, projects total electricity demand growing 65% by 2050, with data centres alone reaching an estimated 8.6% of total demand by then, and flags a possible supply gap opening as early as 2032. Toronto’s own deep lake water cooling system, operating since August 17, 2004, draws near-freezing water from 83 metres down in Lake Ontario to cool more than 100 downtown buildings, cutting electricity use for cooling substantially compared with conventional air conditioning — Enwave’s current page says by 90%, earlier sourcing said roughly 75%; the two figures come from different years and scopes, and the research file carries both rather than picking one — a real, operating piece of the city’s energy infrastructure, not a pilot project.