EIA's Annual Energy Outlook Roadshow arrives at CMU

In September 2026, U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Administrator Tristan Abbey brought the Annual Energy Outlook Roadshow to the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University to share the report’s findings with an invested audience of students and faculty. 

Abbey was introduced during the lecture by Joe DeCarolis, a fitting choice. Not only is DeCarolis the current Head of CMU’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, but he is also Abbey’s predecessor, having previously served as EIA Administrator from 2022 to 2025. The EIA is an independent statistical and analytical agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that is regarded as the nation’s premier source of energy information. 

The Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) is the flagship publication of the EIA and is built on the open-source National Energy Modeling System. At the AEO’s core are ten side cases that project where the U.S. energy industry is headed along different axes over the next several years to decades.

“Data is EIA’s center of gravity. Our mission, the unique role we play in energy markets, modeling, and analysis, is to be the steward of energy data—to safeguard its integrity and accuracy, ensure its relevance and timeliness, and make it freely accessible to the American people,” said Abbey.

Our mission is to be the steward of energy data—to safeguard its integrity and accuracy, ensure its relevance and timeliness, and make it freely accessible to the American people.

Tristan Abbey, Administrator, U.S. Energy Information Administration

The side cases use a variety of technical and economic assumptions and highlight the impact of policies. In the 2026 AEO, a few of the notable projections include: 

• Data center load is emerging as the dominant driver of long-term U.S. electricity growth 
• U.S. total energy consumption remains largely flat, with greatest growth in the industrial sector 
• Electric vehicle shares grow in all cases; policies play a critical role when it comes to the magnitude of the growth
• In an evolving power grid, natural gas, solar, and wind grow most 

Abbey noted that policies and other conditions are continuously evolving, and that projections don’t always play out as described in the AEO’s forecasts. To that end, EIA also publishes a report known as the Retrospective that compares AEO projections to realized outcomes to serve as another valuable, accessible resource for supporting energy research. 

In addition to delivering the AEO results, the Administrator’s visit to CMU also included technical sessions with students from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy and the Energy Science, Technology, and Policy master’s program to evaluate how open-source energy models are supportive tools for researchers.