ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the history of energy forecasts and scenarios in West Germany in the decades 1950-1990. It shows that forecasting techniques were crucial in structuring the emerging field of energy policy and analyzes them as sociotechnical objects that defined boundaries between scientific and political questions in German energy discourse. The chapter analyzes how forecasting techniques were introduced into energy debates at the global level and later in national policy-making. The first forecasting studies originated at the US RAND Corporation in a context of Cold War nuclear confrontation. The assumption of energy shortages turned out to be wrong by the end of the 1950s, as cheap oil flooded energy markets. A central economic controversy in this context was about the "elasticity" of energy demand, a notion that refers to the reaction of energy consumers to the variability of energy prices. The Energiewende report was designed rhetorically as an argument of guerilla warfare.
