Energize Weekly, March 7, 2018
Renewable generation has overtaken coal-fired plants in the European Union, providing 30 percent of its electricity, but the growth of renewables has been uneven in the 28-nation bloc with coal hanging on in Eastern Europe.
Since 2000, renewable generation has more than doubled and the combination of wind, solar and biomass accounted for more generation in 2017—679 terawatt-hours or 12 percent annual increase—than either coal or natural gas, according to a report by European think tanks Sandbag and Agora Energiewende.
Wind, solar and biomass provided 20.9 percent of the EU’s electricity compared with 20.6 percent for coal and 19.7 percent for natural gas.
“This is incredible progress, considering just five years ago, coal generation was more than twice that of wind, solar and biomass,” the report said.
The growth in renewable energy production has been steady since 2011, but the report said, “renewables growth has become more concentrated—geographically and by technology.”
Germany and the United Kingdom accounted for 56 percent growth in renewables in the past three years as wind generation became the dominant technology.
Wind provided 46 percent EU renewables growth from 2011 to 2014. Between 2014 and 2017, it accounted for 72 percent of the growth. Solar was responsible for 14 percent of renewable energy production growth between 2014 and 2017.
The surge in wind generation in 2017 was due to good wind conditions and huge investment in wind plants, the report said.
Wind generation in 2017 increased by 19 percent, 58 terawatt-hours, over 2016 with two-thirds of that generation in Germany and the U.K.
In the past seven years, the U.K.’s share of wind, solar and biomass increased in its electricity portfolio by 20 percent, rising to 28 percent in 2017 from 8 percent in 2010.
The only country with a better record during that period is Denmark, where renewable generation provided 74 percent of the country’s electricity in 2017 up from 32 percent in 2010.
The move away from coal-fired generation is also geographically divided. “Western Europe is phasing out coal, but Eastern Europe is sticking to it,” the report said. “Three more Member States announced coal phaseouts in 2017—Netherlands, Italy and Portugal. They join France and the U.K. in committing to phase out coal, while Eastern European countries are sticking to coal. The debate in Germany, Europe’s largest coal and lignite consumer, is ongoing and will only be decided in 2019.”
In December, Poland commissioned a new 1-gigawatt coal (GW) unit at Kozienice, and it has another 5 units under construction that are projected to come online between 2018 and 2020 with a total capacity of around 3.5 GW.
Poland gets a EU record 77 percent of its electricity from coal, followed by the Czech Republic at 49 percent and Bulgaria at 46 percent.
Power production using soft-brown lignite coal, which is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, rose slightly by 6 terawatt-hours or two percent in 2017, with small increases in Greece, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Romania.
“Since the marginal costs of the lignite generation are not exposed to price changes on international energy markets, impulses for the reduction of lignite use can only come from the European emission trading scheme or national initiatives,” the report said.
The slower pace of renewable generation in Central- and South-Eastern Europe is also a reflection of “unnecessarily high financing costs,” which stand in the way of translating the dramatic decline in renewable energy technology costs into truly low cost renewable energy projects, the report said.
