A study found that ever since the conflict in Ukraine began, the European Union has produced more electricity from renewable sources such as the wind and the sun than it ever has before. Germany also broke the record for the amount of electricity it generated from renewable sources. The European Union has set a new benchmark for the amount of electricity generated by solar and wind power (EU). According to a survey conducted by the two environmental think tanks Ember and E3G between March and September of this year, 24 percent of the electricity that was used in the EU came from renewable sources.
During the same time period the previous year, the percentage was 21 percent. The combined output of solar and wind power was 345 terawatt hours, representing a 39-terawatt-hour increase in comparison to the year 2021. According to the findings of the study, Germany also broke a record in March with 104 terawatt hours of electricity generated from wind and solar combined. According to what they said, that is about equivalent to one third of the total amount of electricity. According to the experts, a total of 19 member states of the European Union have achieved new highs in the generation of power from both forms of renewable energy, including France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. As a result of the record production, the European Union (EU) has avoided spending almost 11 billion euros more for gas, according to those working to expedite the energy transition. Chris Rosslowe, who works at Ember, said that renewable sources of energy like wind and solar are already assisting people in Europe. However, the possibility for even more growth in the future was stated by him.
The Federal Statistical Office estimates that in Germany, coal-fired power plants produced close to one-third (31.4%) of the electricity that was produced and fed into the system in the first half of 2022. Consequently, coal-fired power’s significance for energy supply continued to increase, with coal-fired power fed into the grid rising by 17.2% compared to the first half of 2021. The amount of power produced from natural gas, in comparison, decreased by 17.9% over the same period in the previous year, accounting for only 11.7% of the electricity delivered into the grid. Nuclear energy’s drop was even more pronounced: within a year of the closure of three nuclear power plants, the amount of electricity produced by nuclear energy plummeted by 50.8 percent to 6.0 percent of the electricity put into the grid. In comparison, the production of power from renewable sources climbed by 12.1% to reach 48.5%. The photovoltaic feed-in stood out with a growth of 20.1 percent. The statisticians attributed this to the first half of 2022 having an unusually high amount of sunlight hours.