Actually, the jump from 4 to 5.67$/mbtu is pretty daring for an outfit like Morningstar. That means they are significantly increasing their worst case scenarios for energy prices - which means that higher energy prices are finally seeping through to the long term financiers. This is a real change, because it means that they will now lend money on the basis of such higher scenarios.

You have to look at the rest as the usual prudent fudge: scenarios that remain close to current wisdom (which is that energy prices "always come back to the mean") while taking into account the facts on the ground, which are being persistently incompatible with said common wisdom.

So the lower inflation rate is, I think, a concession to "common wisdom" after the daring step of increasing the expected minimum price.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes