Over the past decade, coal power use in the European Union (EU) has fallen by 61%, according to Carbon Brief analysis of new figures from energy analysts Ember.
Solar power output in the EU more than tripled between 2014 and 2024, the report shows, with last year seeing coal generation overtaken for the first time.
Meanwhile, wind generation has more than doubled over the same period.
Wind and solar growth over the past decade pushed EU fossil-fuel generation in 2024 to its lowest level in 40 years, despite the long-term decline of nuclear power.
The increase in wind and solar generation in the EU also helped avoid €59bn in fossil-fuel imports over the past five years, Ember says.
Without the increase in solar and wind capacity since 2019, the EU would have imported an extra 92bn cubic metres (bcm) of gas and 55m tonnes (Mt) of hard coal. Ember says this helped avoid cumulative emissions of some 460m tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2).
Accelerated wind and solar growth facilitated by permitting reform and other measures could help the EU end Russian energy imports entirely, adds Ember.
Five years of falling fossil fuels
Last year marked five years since the passing of the European Green Deal, officially declaring a “climate emergency” and requiring the European Commission to adapt all its proposals to fall in line with limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Since then, the EU’s electricity sector has seen a “deep transformation”, according to Ember, with a “surge” in renewables driving down the use of fossil fuels and related CO2 emissions.
In 2019, fossil fuels provided 39% – some 1,130 terawatt hours (TWh) – of the EU’s electricity, while renewables provided 34% (979TWh). By the end of 2024, fossil fuels had fallen to 29% (793TWh) – the lowest level in at least 40 years – while renewables had grown to nearly half of the mix (47%, 1,300TWh).
The growth of wind and solar ensured that, despite a decline in nuclear over the past 10 years, coal and gas are both being squeezed out of the electricity generation mix in the EU, as shown in the chart below.
The growth of solar and wind over the past five years has cumulatively avoided 736TWh of fossil-fired generation. This is equivalent to 460m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2), or roughly the same as the power-sector emissions of Italy over the past five years, Ember states.
The emissions intensity of electricity fell by 26% over this period, to 213 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour (gCO2 per kWh). This is a steeper decline than that seen in other major economies such as the US, notes Ember, where the emissions intensity of electricity generation fell by 13% over the same period.
Over the past five years, EU solar capacity tripled from 120 gigawatts (GW) to 338GW, continuing the rapid expansion seen in the previous five years. Wind capacity has grown by 37%, from 169GW in 2019 to 231GW in 2024.
Hydropower capacity since the passage of the Green New Deal has remained flat at 130GW and nuclear capacity has fallen from 110GW to 96GW, Ember notes.
The continued growth of wind and solar means EU electricity generation from coal has now dropped by nearly two thirds over the past decade, as the chart below shows. This is despite a small, temporary uptick in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2021.
Moreover, while gas-fired generation in 2024 was slightly higher than it was a decade earlier, it has also dropped every year for the past five years, Ember’s data shows.
Without the growth in renewables since the Green New Deal was brought in, the EU would have spent €59bn on fossil-fuel imports for power generation, according to Ember. Of this, €53bn would have been spent on gas and €6bn on coal.
In total, the EU avoided importing approximately 92bcm, or around 18% of gas consumed in the power sector between the end of 2019 and the end of 2024. It also avoided imports of 55Mt of hard coal.
Coal has been particularly impacted by the growth of solar and wind, falling from 16% of the EU electricity mix in 2019 to less than 10% in 2024. This has more than cancelled out the impact of the temporary uptick in 2021 and 2022 during the gas crisis.
In 2024, coal provided less than 5% of the power mix in 16 EU countries, Ember says, 10 of which had no operating coal power plants.
Portugal phased coal out of its electricity mix completely and a new wave of coal power plant closures is “imminent”, says Ember. There are 11 EU countries that have announced plans to totally phase out coal from their electricity mix in the next five years.
Along with the fall in coal power, gas fell by a quarter over the past five years from providing 20% of EU power in 2019 to 16% in 2024, according to Ember.
This drop has contributed to efforts to limit EU reliance on Russian gas, although imports from the nation still accounted for 14% of total gas consumption in 2024.
While this was down from around 50% in 2019, it was an increase of 18% on the previous year, mainly due to increased imports into Italy, the Czech Republic and France.
According to Ember, the power sector consumed approximately 88bcm of gas in 2024, of which 10bcm (12%) was Russian, as shown in the figure below. These imports provided the country with an estimated €4bn in revenue.
Even with the uptick in 2024, the EU’s power sector is far less reliant on importing Russian gas than it was five years earlier, Ember’s data shows.
Solar continues to surge
There was a record increase in solar generation in 2024, up 54TWh (+22%) year-on-year, according to Ember. This is despite the sector having already seen growth of 40TWh in 2023.
Additionally, 2024 saw record annual capacity additions, with the EU solar fleet growing by 66GW, 4% more than the 63GW addition seen in 2023.
This growth rate is above what national targets would require and nearly sufficient to hit the EU’s 2030 goal, notes Ember, as shown in the figure below.
Ember says this is “highlighting a disconnect between the rapid pace of on-the-ground market trends and the slow response of governments in updating their targets”.
In 2024, solar output grew in all EU members and 16 countries generated more than 10% of their electricity from the technology, the report notes – three more than the previous year.
However, in some countries, solar is getting close to exceeding demand during peak hours, according to Ember. Its report says that 12 EU countries saw solar generating 80% or more of power demand for at least one hour in 2024.
As such, plentiful solar is pushing hourly power prices to zero or even below. In 2024, negative or zero price hours became more common, growing from 2% of hours in 2023 to 4% in 2024 across the EU.
The increase in negative pricing periods highlights the business case for more flexibility options, notes Ember, with consumers able to save money by shifting demand to periods of abundant generation or using battery storage to take advantage of low-cost solar generation by selling it back to the grid during demand peaks.
While the deployment of battery storage has been growing in recent years – doubling to 16GW in 2023 from 8GW in 2022, the report notes – capacity is concentrated in a small number of countries, with Germany and Italy together housing 70% of existing battery capacity in the EU as of the end of 2023.
Additionally, demand flexibility and smart electrification could help consumers reduce their bills, Ember states. Grids and cross-border interconnectors can help to provide additional flexibility across the EU, it adds.
Wind woes easing
Beyond solar, wind generation grew 7TWh year-on-year in 2024, to reach 477TWh, according to Ember.
While this growth is lower than the average of 30TWh seen between 2019 and 2023, the technology remains cost-competitive with fossil power and installation rates are expected to increase in coming years, the report says.
Between 2010 and 2021, the cost of European onshore and offshore wind fell by 68% and 60%, respectively, Ember notes, based on levelised costs, a standardised metric used to gauge the average cost of electricity generation of a technology.
However, wind costs have broadly plateaued since then, according to the report, due to high inflation and supply chain problems following the Covid-19 pandemic and the global energy crisis.
While these issues have affected a range of sectors, the wind industry has felt them more acutely than solar, according to Ember, due to longer lead times and relatively higher upfront investment requirements.
This has been seen around the world, with the UK and the US amongst the nations to have seen their wind sectors knocked by higher prices.
Despite the impact of these factors on the deployment costs of wind, it remains competitive compared to gas generation, argues Ember. The price of buying gas fuel on European markets has grown throughout 2024, sitting at around €50 per megawatt hour (MWh) at the end of the year – well above the pre-crisis norm of €20/MWh.
As such, the average short-run marginal cost of EU gas-fired power across 2024 reached a high of around €125/MWh in December, continues Ember. This remains above the typical costs of both onshore and offshore wind.
In addition to facing macroeconomic headwinds, Ember says that expanding grids, permitting new projects and managing grid connections have been “inadequate for the pace of the energy transition”.
Action is being taken by governments within the EU however, for example, rules brought in to cut the permitting times for onshore wind from six years to two years.
Permitting rates were higher in the first half of 2024 than the previous year in most markets, which Ember says boosts confidence that the project pipeline for wind is strengthening.
In Germany, for example, approvals reached 12GW, up by 60% compared to the same period in 2023, notes the report.
Turbine orders also recovered, up 40% between January and September 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, while auctions awarded contracts to a record 28GW of new capacity across the EU in 2024.
However, while there are signs of growth, delays in recent years have created a wider delivery gap between market forecasts and EU ambition, the report notes.
In a statement, Dr Chris Rosslowe, senior analyst and lead author of the report, says:
“While the EU’s electricity transition has moved faster than anyone expected in the last five years, further progress cannot be taken for granted…However, the achievements of the past five years should instil confidence that, with continued drive and commitment, challenges can be overcome and a more secure energy future be achieved.”
The report calls on the EU to build on the momentum seen in the past five years. Ember suggests this could include ending Russian energy imports, supporting the European wind industry and enacting permitting reforms, among other changes.
The post EU’s solar and wind growth pushes fossil-fuel power to lowest level in 40 years appeared first on Carbon Brief.
EU’s solar and wind growth pushes fossil-fuel power to lowest level in 40 years
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported t