The amount of electricity generated by renewables in Europe has for the first time outpaced supplies coming from coal sources, .
Wind, solar and biomass generation supplied 679 terawatt hours, says climate policy campaign group Sandbag, which published a review of the European energy market today. Coal, on the other hand, contributed a little less than that in total – at 669 terawatt hours.
Just five years ago, coal generation was twice that of renewables in the region.
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There has also been a dramatic shift in the UK’s electricity use. It fell by a surprisingly large amount, two per cent, between 2016 and 2017. EU electricity consumption rose, in contrast, by 0.7 per cent over the same period.
Why the UK’s consumption fell by so much is something of a mystery, says Phil MacDonald at Sandbag. “There’s plenty of speculation but obvious things we’ve ruled out – industrial production is still going up,” he says.
But demand falling by so much actually puts pressure on the UK’s energy network, says Iain Staffell at Imperial College, London. It makes it harder to manage which power stations should be turned on or off.
Over the past seven years, the UK has upped its climate-friendly energy generation to cover a 22 per cent drop in its coal-generated power. Staffell points out that output from wind farms in the UK jumped by 45 per cent between 2016 and 2017.
But the distribution of renewables across the EU is somewhat uneven. The UK and Germany alone accounted for 56 per cent of renewables growth in the past three years – and CO2 emissions rose slightly across the EU from 2016 to 2017.
While The Netherlands, Italy and Portugal all made decisions in 2017 to eventually phase out coal, the fossil fuel still has its champions in Europe. Spain increased its coal consumption slightly and many Eastern European countries have no plans to phase it out. That includes the two countries that rely on coal the most: Poland and the Czech Republic.
