Eurostat has now released electricity data from 2023, and it shows that 44.7% of EU electricity production came from renewable energy sources last year!* Fossil gas (aka “natural gas”) production was down, a lot. Coal production was down even more. Even production from oil and petroleum products (already quite low) was down. Meanwhile, of course, renewable energy production was up! Clearly, in Europe, renewable energy is now winning.
And this is a crossover year, because in 2022, electricity production from fossil fuels was higher than electricity production from renewable energy sources (by a smidge). Let’s get to some graphs and more actual stats now — just note the difference between supply and production with these.
Looking at supply stats for 2023 vs. 2022:
- Brown coal supply down by 24.2%, to 222,840 million tonnes
- Hard coal supply down by 20.4%, to 130,437 million tonnes
- Fossil gas supply down by 7.4%, to 12.8 million terajoules (TJ)
- Oil/petroleum electricity supply down 1.5%, to 526,862 thousand tonnes
- Renewables supply increased 4.4%, up to 10.9 million TJ.
Looking at production stats for […]
This is excellent news indeed. The question will become: Are we willing to share these technological gains with the third world? If we don’t what will occur is that the decreased demand for petrol products will cause a decline in price, and the third world will make the purchase because everyone wants to live a first world lifestyle. We’re all in this together, and the sooner we actualize that in behavioral terms the better off we will all be.
I totally agree with you, Albus on this subject in particular. We all (humans and animals and plants) will benifit from a less poluted environment!