Shocked into action
Answering multiple threats to security, European countries are accelerating the shift from fossil fuels towards renewables.
Highlights
19
19 European governments accelerated their decarbonisation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, gas crisis and Russia's aggression
63%
Under latest national plans, EU countries will reach 63% of renewables share in electricity generation by 2030, up from 55% under previous commitments
31%
EU countries cut planned 2030 fossil fuel power generation by 31% (272 TWh) compared to national strategies from 2019 (NECPs)
About
In this report, CREA and Ember analyse European national responses to the gas crisis and Russia’s war on Ukraine. They show that the majority of European countries have significantly stepped up their ambition in terms of renewable energy deployment since 2019, while decreasing planned 2030 fossil fuel generation to shield themselves from geopolitical threats.
An up-to-date breakdown of policy announcements by country is available in Ember’s European target tracker.
Authors: Paweł Czyżak, Erika Uusivuori, Andrei Ilas, Alison Candlin
Executive summary
Recent crises have accelerated EU countries’ energy transition
In response to Russia’s aggression and soaring fossil prices, most EU Member States have announced significant increases in renewables deployment, while scaling down plans for fossil fuels.
Senior Energy & Climate Data Analyst, Ember
The EU has put the energy transition on turbocharge, with governments getting serious about cutting out costly fossil fuels. There’s a consensus that ramping up wind and solar power quicker can help the EU head off multiple crises.
Erika Uusivuori Analyst, Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air
Europe now recognises that fossil fuels equal volatility. The current energy landscape is unprecedented, but a jump in ambition to cut fossil fuel dependence is now putting countries on a path to more security.
New policies
Governments are replacing fossil fuels with renewables in response to Russia's aggression
A total of 19 governments updated their renewables expansion and/or fossil fuel phase-outs beyond the ambition of National Energy and Climate Plans.
EU countries cannot afford to limit focus to the power sector: measures should span across the whole economy. Meanwhile, the oil sector has still not seen direct country-level measures to reduce demand in the short run — which could help countries avoid a crunch with the ban on Russian oil. REPowerEU proposals targeting industry, such as hydrogen uptake, fuel substitution and energy efficiency are expected to lead to a marginal decline in oil demand. A vote by the Environment Committee of the European Parliament to ban the sale of internal combustion engines in the EU by 2035 should help accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles and drive down oil consumption, but more ambitious short-term actions are needed to reduce oil demand.
Conclusion
Speeding away from fossil fuels
Recent EU national policies show a growing consensus that fossil fuel dependence exposes countries to geopolitical and economic threats. But a few remaining laggards need to update their policies for their own security.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought into stark relief for Europe the security risks related to fossil fuel import dependence. Under this new paradigm, it is not just climate change but geopolitics driving swift renewable energy deployment and accelerated fossil fuel phase-outs.
Addressing the new situation, EU national governments have already increased their RES targets, on average from 55% under the NECPs to 63%, which will likely increase further to 69% under REpowerEU. At the same time, planned 2030 fossil generation dropped by a third, showing how seriously national governments are treating the security risks associated with fossil import dependence.
Decarbonization of heat and industry have also seen much needed attention. Five European countries have announced policies related to retrofits, energy efficiency in buildings, clean heat, while REPowerEU aims to target the deployment of 10 million heat pumps over the next five years. But much more could be done on tackling opportunities beyond the power sector. Especially the transport sector requires more efforts – while oil demand is expected to decrease via measures targeting industry within REPowerEU, it has not been actively targeted by policies up to now.
The way forward is now clear – the security of the European continent can only be ensured through phasing out fossil fuels. Most governments have already stepped up to this challenge and laggards need to swiftly join the united REPowerEU effort, scaling up wind and solar, improving energy efficiency and decarbonising their economies. Numerous examples show that this is both essential and beneficial, and could be used as a guideline for countries outside of Europe as the impacts of fossil fuel volatility continue to spread.
Annex
Country-level policy announcements
An up-to-date breakdown of policy announcements by country is available in Ember’s European target tracker.
In Poland, there is growing support for achieving a 50% share of renewable energy by 2030 instead of 32% which is the current target. The Minister of Climate has recently stated that 50 GW of renewable energy can be achieved by 2030 and published draft assumptions for the new national strategy, aiming for 50% renewable electricity in 2040.
UPDATE 01/06/2022: The Polish Recovery and Resilience Plan was accepted by the European Commission on June 1st, 2022. The Plan increases onshore wind and solar forecasts from around 15 GW under the NECP to 23 GW in 2025. Due to the timing, it was not possible to include this change in the report.
Bulgaria has a pipeline of 15 GW of renewable energy projects while Romania has anywhere between 15 to 30 GW in its pipeline. Romania has recently launched a call for supporting renewable energy projects to the tune of EUR 500 million. Slovakia announced a total of nine calls to finance with more than EUR 220 Million renewable energy, repowering and flexibility of the transmission grid. Between 2020 and 2022 several countries – Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Poland, Romania and Slovenia officially announced their coal phase-out dates.
Central and Eastern European countries are also seeing renewed impetus for older nuclear projects and for newer ones such as the one Bulgaria and Greece are discussing to build and operate jointly. Furthermore, Czech Republic has prequalified companies from France, South Korea and the USA to build a new nuclear reactor of 1,200 MW and Romania has recently announced a memorandum with NuScale to develop small modular reactors.
Supporting Material
Methodology
Measuring the impact of policy changes
The calculations in this report build on the NECP assessment published by Ember in 2020, applying changes to energy policies announced by national governments between 2020 and 2022. In this period several events impacted political decisions – the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the gas crisis in 2021, the war in Ukraine in 2022. Many coal phase-outs were announced during COP26 in 2021, together with clean power by 2035 commitments from major economies such as the UK, Germany and USA.
The changes in policies are across a number of varying metrics – e.g. wind and solar capacity increases, coal phase-out dates, RES share in generation goals. All these targets have been transformed into consistent share in generation figures for RES, fossil fuels and clean energy. Clean electricity includes wind and solar and other low-emission sources like hydro and nuclear, and excludes unabated fossil fuels, such as coal and gas.
Country-level data and references are available in the attached spreadsheet. Capacities were transformed into generation using country-level capacity factors derived from the EU Commission’s MIX scenario. Where coal phase-out dates were announced and no estimates on the generation were provided, a linear reduction of generation from 2021 towards the phase-out date was assumed. One of the exceptions was Romania, where the Recovery and Resilience Plan assumes that in 2030 one last 810 MW unit will operate – to estimate its generation we’ve assumed a capacity factor of 20%. The other exception was Czechia, where an estimate of 15 TWh coal generation in 2030 was available in Ember’s previous briefing, aligned with a 2033 phaseout date.
The resulting additional RES generation is assumed to replace fossil fuels, not nuclear energy. An exception is Hungary, where the high clean share is achieved through a nuclear program. In other CEE countries – Croatia, Czechia, Slovenia, Romania, the coal generation decreases are assumed to be replaced by renewables – not gas (due to geopolitical reasons) nor nuclear, since it is unlikely that new nuclear projects will be commissioned by 2030 (e.g. the expansion of the Dukovany plant in Czechia is planned for 2036, three years after the coal phase-out, which means the coal generation will need to be replaced with renewables).
In some cases, clean generation might exceed 100% – e.g. in Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, France. Overproduction is generally seen as positive – as it could provide economic benefits to host countries and decrease fossil generation in neighbouring countries. This was however not examined in the analysis – country generation was capped at 100%.
A total of 19 governments updated their renewables expansion and/or fossil fuel phase-outs beyond the ambition of National Energy and Climate Plans – please note a previous estimate of 16 was increased to 19 to include new coal phase-out declarations.
On 01/06/2022 new policy updates from Poland and Romania were published, but were not included in the calculations due to the timing.
Ember’s European target tracker contains up-to-date information about latest government policies and their impact on the electricity mix.
Acknowledgements
Paweł Czyżak; Erika Uusivuori; Andrei Ilas; Alison Candlin
ContributorsRonja Borgmästars; Hannah Broadbent; Sarah Brown; Harriet Fox; Charles Moore; Lauri Myllyvirta; Maciej Zieliński
Kindly peer-reviewed by Pieter de Pous, Senior Policy Advisor, E3G
