Abstract
The policy related to the use of renewable sources is a key element of the energy policy executed in the European Union (EU). One of the targets set for 2050 is to increase the share of electricity in energy consumption to 50%, and 80% of electricity is to be generated from low-carbon sources. In recent years, the EU economies have significantly modified their electricity production, which raises the question of the scale of these changes. The aim of the presented analysis is to assess changes in the use of renewable sources for electricity production in the EU countries in 2005–2019. Gini coefficient and k-mean are applied in the analysis. The conducted research shows that EU countries, in line with the energy policy assumptions, have both increased the share of renewable sources in energy production, especially in electricity production, as well as increased the diversity of used renewable sources. The results also indicate a vast diversity in terms of the use of such sources for the production of renewable electricity in the EU. This indicates that the energy transition is being implemented by EU countries with individual country-level approaches. Nonetheless, a variety of the EU’s both support and restrictive measures are of considerable importance for the ongoing energy transition.
Highlights
The energy policy is one of the key pillars of the functioning of individual countries, as the energy sector is a driving force behind the economic development
We describe the types of renewable sources (RESs, according to the Eurostat’s classification) used for the electricity production in the European Union (EU) and characterize the changes that have occurred in the shares of the five most popular renewable energy sources (RESs) in renewable energy production from RES (GEP_RES)
As different countries have different levels of use of renewable energy sources (RESs) in electricity production (GEP), in our main analyses, we focused only on the electricity generated from RES (GEP_RES) and its amount generated from each RES
Summary
The energy policy is one of the key pillars of the functioning of individual countries, as the energy sector is a driving force behind the economic development. Numerous actions have been taken around the world to accelerate the energy transition towards low-carbon economies using renewable energy sources (RESs) This is because, among other things, such an intensive use of energy products has negative effects on the environment, such as excessive exploitation of non-renewable energy sources and high emissions of harmful substances, including CO2 , SO2 , or nitrogen oxides. These problems are highlighted and discussed in References [2,3,4,5,6,7], among others. The greatest intensification of energy transition activities has been observed in Europe
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