War in Ukraine caused a rush to get off of Russian gas, but to meet climate goals, a lot more renewable energy is needed.
A new report finds that since war broke out early this year, about a quarter of the electricity in the European Union has come from wind and the sun. That’s a record, and the increase in wind and solar power has saved the EU €11 billion in gas costs since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it politically impossible to buy gas from Russia.
According to a new report from the energy think tank Ember and the climate think tank E3G, 19 of the 27 countries in the bloc broke their own records for generating electricity from solar and wind power. Poland, which has always used a lot of coal, saw the biggest jump, with solar and wind generation going up by 48.5%. Spain also had the largest increase in the amount of electricity it made from solar and wind power. It increased the amount of electricity it gets from wind and sun by 7.4TWh, or 35%.All of this additional renewable energy also helped to compensate for a 21% drop in hydroelectricity production across the European Union caused by a severe drought.
19 countries set new records for themselves
Europe is still in the middle of an energy crunch that has been going on for years. It started when rising gas demand met a tight supply in 2021, when the economy started moving again after being shut down by a pandemic. This year, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made it even more painfully clear that the EU needs Russian gas. Prior to this year’s conflict, Russia supplied approximately 45 percent of the gas imported by the EU.
The bloc was already making plans to switch to cleaner energy sources to limit the effects of climate change, which were sped up by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year, the European Commission came up with a plan to stop using fossil fuels from Russia “well before 2030” and to get 45 percent of its energy from renewable sources by the same date.
We have a long way to go before we can achieve any of those goals. Between March and September of this year, wind and solar powered about a quarter of the EU’s electricity. Gas, on the other hand, still powered about a fifth of the EU’s electricity. Some countries have also had to change their plans for nuclear energy because of the energy crisis. Germany was supposed to shut down its last few nuclear power plants by the end of this year, but the country has now said that the plants will stay open until mid-April of next year.
Europe’s new reliance on renewable energy isn’t just because of war. Countries are also preparing for a November United Nations climate conference to follow up on promises made in the 2015 Paris Agreement. According to a report released today by the NGO World Resources Institute, the world is only on track to cut CO2 emissions, which heat up the planet, by 7% from 2019 levels by 2030. To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, the world needs to cut its emissions by 7.6% every year this decade. That’s a lot more solar and wind power to use in Europe and other places around the world.
