The cost of primary energy is rising more and more rapidly since 1973, and this-is the fact even with uranium, although no shortages or political pressures as in the case of oil have occurred. The availability of oil becomes more and more difficult, because of political and occurrence problems. With current oil consumption figures, this primary energy source will be largely exhausted around the year 2000. II.2.4 Electricity Demand Forecasts Since there were not enough data available for Western Europe, we only considered forecasts for the current EC member countries. Fig. 2.1 presents a collection of combined extrapolations of several electricity demand forecasts. Most figures did not consider the time beyond the year 2000. Only one source reported two demand figures for Western Europe for 2000 and 2025. Between 1980 and 2000 all the prognoses did not differ significantly, but the rate of increase did. To get an imagination of electricity demand development, we made several approaches for the time between 2000 and 2025, the first attempt was to extrapolate the OECD estimates for the EC with constant growth rates. These curves do not make much sense in our opinion, because they show a 20 fold, respectively 11 fold electricity demand which appears to be unreasonable. The next attempt was to reduce the OECD figures for Western Europe including Yugoslavia and Turkey linearly to the EC situation and to connect them with the EC estimates of the year 2000. The figures for the year 2025 were then 9150 or 6100 TWh/year. A third attempt was to adapt recent DOE forecasts for the USA to the EC curves. This again produced higher demand forecasts. In a last attempt we tried to generate a power demand curve from 1979 to 2025 by considering the main parameters which influence demand development. These parameters are: - the development of population in the EC, - the development of the requirements of the population, - the development of industry in the EC, - the development of the requirements of the industry, - the substitution of other power sources by electricity, - the influence of technology advancements, and - the influence of cost development.
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