Energy production is considered as one of the key indicators for economic development. It is vital to improve the renewable energy production for global sustainability, while leveraging the national resources. This study is contributing to the demonstration of using genetic algorithms (GA) in the development of future energy scenarios as well as to the strategic energy studies in Turkey. The forecasting model developed in this study uses forward feeding back-propagation (BP) method improved by GA. The proposed model is applied in the Turkish case. The test errors are shown to emphasize the positive difference between the proposed model and the classical BP model. The results highlight that there is strong evidence indicating that the government should reconsider their current energy strategies. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.