Green sources overtake fossil fuels for electricity generation in the European Union for the first time in history

The past 2020 will be remembered by many as a difficult and rather controversial year. But, despite all the difficulties, new significant records were set.

Thus, according to the annual report of the Agora Energiewende Institute, which was carried out together with specialists from Ember, living in For the first time in history, people in the European Union received more energy from renewable energy sources than from fossil fuels fuel.

According to a report that monitors the European Union's energy sector since 2015, in the past Green energy sources produced 38% of electricity during the year, compared to 37% that came from fossil fuels. Such an event became possible thanks to purposeful work on the development of alternative energy sources.

And, according to statistics, the amount of energy generated by solar and wind has doubled since 2015. And only these two "green" sources accounted for 1/5 of all energy generation in the past 2020.

In addition, last year, energy generation due to coal combustion was reduced by 20% at once, and currently coal provides only 13% of energy generation.

As D. Jones (chief analyst at Ember), such a sharp decline in coal use was made possible by the explosive development of solar and wind parks. In Europe, the focus is on wind and sun, which should allow full use of not only coal for energy generation by 2030.

But also to abandon new nuclear power plants and systematically close existing ones, displacing them with the same "green" sources of generation and to meet the ever-increasing demand for energy from electric vehicles, heat pumps and electrolysis.

Despite rather serious quarantine measures, which led to a decrease in electricity consumption around the world, green sources not only did not reduce production, but increased it.

All this made it possible to reduce air emissions by a significant 29% from the indicators of 2015. But the European authorities do not want to stop there. So last month a document was adopted according to which by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by at least 55% from the 1990 level.

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