25 Jan 2017

“EU power emissions fell by 4.5 percent in 2016”

Sandbag / Agora Energiewende

Due to a huge switch from coal to gas power generation, EU power emissions fell 4.5 percent last year, according to an analysis by energy think tanks Sandbag and Agora Energiewende*. “Year-on-year, coal generation across Europe fell by 12 percent, whilst gas increased by 20 percent,” according to a Sandbag press release. Renewables’ share increased only slightly to 29.6 percent from 29.2 percent last year. The outlook for a continuous shift from coal to gas is dim, “because there are very few coal plant closures announced to 2020, the gas price has risen back above the price of coal, and the proposed reforms for the European Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) are unlikely to significantly raise the carbon price,” states an Agora press release.

Find the Sandbag press release and the study in English here and the Agora press release in English here.

For a comparison with German power trends, read the CLEW article Little headway in 2016 for Germany’s energy transition - think tank.

*Like the Clean Energy Wire, Agora Energiewende is a project funded by Stiftung Mercator and the European Climate Foundation.

All texts created by the Clean Energy Wire are available under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” . They can be copied, shared and made publicly accessible by users so long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.