Decarbonizing the EU's Electricity: What Has Worked, What Hasn't

Jona Sassenhagen

Here's a look at how the EU's countries fulfill their energy requirements (hover over/tap on chart elements for extra info):

It's a lot to take in! On the left, we have the electricity mix, including imports. Each row represents a country, each colored segment one source of energy. Included are net imports (some countries, such as France or Sweden, are heavy exporters of surplus energy). On the right there are two "costs" of electricity: energy prices private households pay (in $ per kilowatt hour), and emissions (in grams of CO₂ per kilowatt hour). Countries are sorted by emissions intensity, with the cleanest electricity at the bottom.

Sweden and Finland lead the pack, powered by their nuclear power plants (at 30–40% of electricity generation) and hydro power (at 40% and 15–20%, respectively). France, lacking these Nordic countries' hydro potential, relies even more heavily on nuclear power, at 70% of generation. Moreover, France and Sweden are major exporters of energy, providing their neighbors with low-carbon energy in times of need! On the other extreme, the two largest emitters of CO₂ emissions are, in absolute terms, Poland and Germany. Poland stands at around 65% fossil fuels, mostly coal; Germany at around 35%, roughly evenly split between lignite, hard coal, and natural gas. (Why is Estonia so dirty? They burn a lot of oil shale, a fossil fuel even more polluting than coal.)

Among the countries with emissions below the EU's average (~150g of CO₂ per kWh), there is just one which doesn't have at least 50% of its energy coming from a combination of three types of dispatchable low-carbon energy: nuclear power, non-variable renewables such as hydro and biomass, and imports (which aren't technically a dispatchable energy generation form, but fulfill the same purpose in a grid: energy on tap without local emissions). Low-carbon non-dispatchable renewables like wind and solar (also called intermittent renewables), and high-carbon fossil fuels, don't seem to provide a particularly viable strategy for decarbonization; fossils, obviously, because they emit carbon, and wind and solar because they require dispatchable backup.

Up to this point, EU countries that have successfully lowered emissions of their energy generation have done so with either 1. nuclear power, 2. hydro power, or 3. a combination of the above. (As Czechia and Bulgaria show, it's not enough to have nuclear power, one has to also turn off the coal!) To visualise this, try this: click on the legend entries to disable energy sources. If you disable Wind, Solar and Fossils, you will see that the top 7 lowest emitters all exceede 60% from low-carbon dispatchable sources. That is not to say it will never be possible for the EU to decarbonize without low-carbon dispatchables; just that so far, it hasn't happened.

The striking exception is Denmark, at around 100 grams of CO₂ per kWh. In fact, it is the only country in the EU deriving more than 50% of its energy from intermittent renewables: no other EU country has let its share of dispatchable energy drop below 50%. Slightly more than half of Denmark's energy consumption is covered by wind, plus some solar. It imports clean energy from Sweden and Norway and dirty energy from Germany, but imports cover only around 10% of its needs. On the other hand, Danes pay some of the highest prices for their electricity, often in a tight race to the bottom between similarly expensive Ireland and Germany; around double that of the other Nordic countries.