Solar overtook coal in the European Union’s electricity production in 2024, with the share of renewables rising to almost half the bloc’s power sector, according to a report released Thursday.
Gas generation, meanwhile, declined for the fifth year in a row and fossil-fuelled power dipped to a “historic low”, climate think tank Ember said in its European Electricity Review 2025.
“The European Green Deal has delivered a deep and rapid transformation of the EU power sector,” the think tank said.
“Solar remained the EU’s fastest-growing power source in 2024, rising above coal for the first time. Wind power remained the EU’s second-largest power source, above gas and below nuclear.”
Overall, strong growth in solar and wind have boosted the share of renewables to 47 percent, up from 34 percent in 2019.
Fossil fuels have fallen from 39 to 29 percent.
“A surge in wind and solar generation is the main reason for declining fossil generation. Without wind and solar capacity added since 2019, the EU would have imported 92 billion cubic metres more of fossil gas and 55 million tonnes more of hard coal, costing €59 billion,” the report said.
According to Ember, these trends are widespread across Europe, with solar power progressing in all EU countries.
More than half have now either eliminated coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, or reduced its share to less than five percent of their energy mix.
But Rosslowe cautioned much work remains.
“We need to accelerate our efforts, particularly in the wind power sector,” he said.
Europe’s electricity system will also need to increase its storage capacity to make the most of renewable energies, which are by definition intermittent, he added.
In 2024, plentiful solar energy helped drive down prices in the middle of the day, sometimes even resulting in “negative or zero price hours” due to an overabundance of supply compared to demand.
“A readily available solution is a battery co-located with a solar plant. This gives solar power producers more control over the prices they receive and helps them avoid selling for low prices in the middle of the day,” the report said.
The think tank suggested consumers could reduce their bills by shifting usage to periods of abundance (smart electrification), while battery operators could earn revenue from buying power when prices are low and selling it back when demand peaks.
Batteries have advanced significantly in recent years, with installed capacity across the EU doubling to 16 GW in 2023, compared with 8 GW in 2022, according to Ember.
But this capacity is concentrated in just a small number of countries: 70 percent of existing batteries were located in Germany and Italy at the end of 2023.
Fossil fuels have fallen from 39 to 29 percent.
That is the bigger news, though pretty consistent all of this year. EU electricity demand grew even as fossil generation saw deep cuts, and renewables growth is nearly certain to outgrow demand further.
The problem with solar in much of Europe is that it’s basically summer power only. You can’t solve that with batteries, unfortunately.
I like using less coal and gas in summer, but solar won’t fix things in December. Wind will.
Was the goal to ever only use one source of renewables?
So a problem with a solution then?
I guess batteries are for the evening/night/morning, not for the winter.
Exactly. I’m just surprised that the article suggest solar+battery, which is a great solution for owners of solar farms, but not so useful for everyone else.
Maybe its for those setting up a personal solar “farm” for making some money, like you dont need to sell your electricity for scrap in the daytime because with batteries you can sell it when it’s more expensive. Like a capitalist sales speech :-)
But IDK.
Wind or Nuclear.
I get that nuclear is a Boogeyman for some but it really is one of the better options for taking a step in the right direction and getting us closer to less oil dependency.
The the problem with wind is that it’s fairly unreliable (you don’t know when you’ll get power), as well as being relatively high maintenance (though not compared to coal).
There are some interesting early pilot projects where long term energy storage is being tested.
Current EV batteries are not even close to being suitable for grid energy storage, so we need something completely different for that. It’s probably going to take a long time before anything viable gets mass produced, which means that at the moment we’re stuck with internment renewables and polluting fossil fuels.
Current EV batteries are not even close to being suitable for grid energy storage
What do you mean?
It can definitely store more than enough to power a household over night, for some people potentially a week, If I use 10kwh a day and have an 80kwh+ size EV battery it will definitely provide me with enough cheap power for a week and complimented every time the sun comes out
I still don’t understand why there aren’t great big fat energy pipes connecting Europe to Algeria and getting in a whole ton of that year round cheap sun energy
EV batteries are not ideal for grid energy storage due to:
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Unnecessary features: High energy density is essential for vehicles but not for stationary grid storage. That feature doesn’t come for free, so why pay for it if you don’t need it. An industrial scale grid energy facility could be located outside the city where land is cheap. Who cares if the facility takes as much space as a paper mill or a mine site. Besides, these batteries aren’t going anywhere, so who cares if they weigh several tonnes each.
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Cost efficiency: EV batteries are expensive per unit of capacity. Grid storage requires massive amounts of cheaper alternatives. Various industries need a lot of energy, so the storage demand is also massive. This means that a battery facility of functional size that uses normal NMC batteries is going to cost a fortune. Cheaper alternatives such LFP would make more sense.
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Material scarcity: The rare materials used in EV batteries (like lithium) would be challenging to scale up for grid-level storage needs. Households are only a small slice of the pie, while factories and other types of industries take the rest. We really need to use materials that are dirt cheap and easily available, so even LFP isn’t going to cut it long term.
Current NMC and NCA batteries used in cars should be good enough for the energy needs of a single house, but the rest of society needs an industrial scale solution. There are several technologies that look promising, but they aren’t quite production ready just yet. I’m really looking forward to seeing how redox flow batteries develop in the future. There are also some interesting battery chemistries such as sodium-ion, oxygen-ion, magnesium-ion, and lithium-sulfur.
Most EVs this year will use LFP batteries because they are much cheaper. They also provide grid with a free resource, and EU likely has the critical mass to let consumers monetize service to grid. A big advantage of LFP is longer life, and so more consumer profit opportunity, and less investment required by grid.
I’ll take Germany as an example to see if the numbers make sense.
Annual electricity consumption in Germany is about 512 TWh/year, which means they use about 1.4 TWh every day. Let’s assume that all of it is produce by renewable means, and about 50% of the daily energy demand needs to be buffered in grid energy storage to balance the intermitent nature of renewable energy production. This means you would need about 701 GWh of storage capacity in total. If we assume that the each car has about 100 kWh of storage capacity, you would need about 7 million cars like that. The population of Germany is about 83 million, so roungly 1 car per 12 people should do the trick.
It’s nothing crazy like 20 cars per one person. on the contrary, it looks surprisingly doable, given that Germany already has abouto 49 million cars registered. However, producing millions of batteries using NMC or NCA technology is a bottle neck. LFP would be cheaper, but it still requires lithium. Meeting the demands of one country is entirely doable, but the rest of the world uses electricity too. Would there be enough lithium for all the LFP batteries we would need? Estimating that is very tricky due to the way mineral exploration works, but let’s not dive into that rabbit hole today.
Anyway, using the existing battery chemistries to take steps in this direction should be worth it because transportation and electricity production are major sources of CO2 emissions. I still don’t think these technologies are quite enough to meet the demand. We really need to develop some alternate energy storage solutions that don’t depend on relatively rare elements like lithium and cobalt. For example, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, oxygen would be great alternatives if we just figure out how to make viable batteries out of them.
1.4 TWh every day
This means you would need about 701 GWh of storage capacity in total.
Less because most electricity is consumed in daytime, or can be incentivized to with Summer solar.
so roungly 1 car per 12 people should do the trick.
US sells 1 car per 20 people every year. Not sure about Germany. But if same, 20% of car sales as EVs is potential to meet that in 3 years.
Meeting the demands of one country is entirely doable, but the rest of the world uses electricity too.
11m EVs sold in China 2024. Lithium prices not skyrocketing, and so production level could absorb more.
We really need to develop some alternate energy storage solutions that don’t depend on relatively rare elements like lithium and cobalt. For example, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, oxygen would be great alternatives if we just figure out how to make viable batteries out of them.
Sodium Ion batteries are in commercial production now. It does mean unlimited battery materials for humanity. Lithium is not particularly rare though. It is Nickel and Cobalt that are rare, and LFP doesn’t use those. Hydrogen is important to just have alternate use of both abundant renewables, and abundant batteries.
Totally forgot about hydrogen. Using that technology in cars has proven to be possible in Norway, so clearly that’s an option too. When energy production exceeds demand, it makes sense to dump that energy into hydrolysis, and later use that hydrogen when the opposite happens. You could use that with industrial scale solutions and cars as well, so that seems like viable strategy.
Small counterpoint to yours; soon there will be only EVs it seems. So availability / features / suboptimal fit for purpose is all moot when you have the car that can act as a battery…
In Belgium a lot of cars are basically part of compensation from employers ; furthering the use of those for overnight storage would make plenty of sense and be an easy way to kickstart the initiative a low cost for the users and would put a positive twist on those compny cars.
China and Europe are probably going to be fully electric sooner than the rest of the world. Getting there is already quite a task for the entire production chain. Ramping it up will take decades, and I’m still not entirely sure we even have the resources for it.
Yeah it seems to pick up traction and accelerate as of late; more and more new cars are EVs, charging stations are blooming everywhere even in my backward ardennes… so at least for us there seems to be enough resources. Fuck the poors thought because cheap EVs are still not affordable enough but that’s not the point we’re discussing. And the rest of the world we’ll see. But if this is part of the solution it’s happening and it’s nice.
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