Forecasting Energy Demand and Policy Impacts in Illinois
The Illinois Manufacturers' Association commissioned Synapse to develop a public report on the current energy landscape in Illinois. The report provides a snapshot of where the state is now on the following key topics:
• State Policies
• Energy Costs
• Resource Mix
• Transmission System Planning
• Data Centers and Large Loads
• Federal Incentives
The report looks at the decisions facing policymakers across all of these topics, all of which relate to ensuring both resource adequacy and lower emissions for Illinois and how both tasks rest on disparate dynamics at play in the energy system. The roadmap that Illinois selects for the future of the energy industry will impact businesses, industrial stakeholders, and consumers across Illinois.
The last section of the report presents a load forecast for Illinois, developed by Synapse, to examine the potential future that the state needs to be planning for. Because various factors will impact actual loads over the next couple of decades, Synapse developed a range of what future forecasted load may look like. Specifically, we created low-, medium-, and high-load growth electricity forecasts through 2050, comprising various components that will contribute to electric loads. In looking at the aggregate load, in the lowest electricity growth scenario, electric load falls by 2 percent by 2050. In the medium scenario, load grows by 97 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2050. In the low scenario, as a result of increased levels of energy efficiency (which offsets minor load growth from data centers, transportation electrification, and conventional load), 2050 load falls by 2 percent, relative to the recent past. In the high scenario, load grows by over 450 TWh by 2050, an increase of over 320 percent relative to the recent past.