Where Europe stands on replacing fossil energy with renewables

Brussels – In 2024, renewable energy sources in the European Union increased by 3.4 percent compared to 2023, amounting to approximately 11.3 million terajoules. At the same time, the steep decline of coal supplies continued, with lignite dropping by 10 percent and anthracite by 13.8 percent. After a sharp drop in natural gas supply in 2023, the following year saw it as the only one that inched up (0.3 percent), while oil supply also fell by just over 1 percent from the previous year.

The result is that, in 2024, with the help of nuclear energy, renewable energy accounted for 47.3 percent of total electricity production in the EU, representing an increase of almost 8 percentage points compared to the previous year.

These are the data reported by Eurostat, which certainly represent a positive trend towards the commitments of the European agenda.

Although encouraging, the improvements may still not be enough to allow for celebrations: the Union’s climate goals, while lighting the way for the rest of the world, could be more delayed than they appear.

The ecological plans of the Old Continent, in a period marked by war and economic crisis, are, however, at the center of a bitter political clash between those who want to defend them and those who believe they clash with the industrial and economic commitments needed to meet the current challenges.  These include the Green Deal, conceived in 2019, which charts a path towards a zero climate impact Europe by 2050 and a 55 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030; the Paris Agreement, whose primary goal is to limit the average global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century; and a general trail of actual commitment starting as far back as 1997 with the Kyoto Protocol, the first real agreement addressing global warming at a transnational level.

Are the achievements the desired progress?

Surely the Repower EU initiative – the plan to end the Russia-Europe energy dependency –  the NRRP, and the Next Generation Europe funds, will direct energy funding toward green projects. However, the European Commission’s February 2025 Joint Research Center (JRC) study shows that despite improvements from 2023 to 2024, to date of the 154 Green Deal targets, only 32 are considered to be on track, while 15 have not made any progress, 64 need acceleration, and for the rest, there is insufficient data. Of the 87 binding targets, only 13 are on track. One example is the reduction of energy consumption by 11.7 percent by 2030 compared to 2020 levels, yet current policies only envisage a reduction in consumption of 5.8 percentage points.

While it is true that some of the targets have been met (or even exceeded), such as the installed capacity in photovoltaics, which in 2024 reached approximately 338 gigawatts compared to the 320 hoped for in 2025, it is also true that the European Union will have to make greater efforts at the legislative level (intervening on countries that do not respect their commitments) and at the diplomatic level. It will not be possible to achieve global goals, including limiting temperature increases,  without the cooperation of all countries — European and non-European. Especially non-Europeans, who still seem to be insufficiently committed, effectively slow the global impact of progress and the efforts of the Union, as unregulated emissions, such as those from China, which alone release around 30 percent of global CO2 emissions.