Abstract
European Union Directive 2009/28/EC established that the share of renewable energy in the final energy consumption should reach a target of 20% by 2020 in European Union (EU) countries. This study analyses the tendency of this share using data for EU 28, taken from the Eurostat database for the period 1995–2016. First, after a brief statistical and economic analysis of the three macroeconomic indicators at EU level, five regression models (polynomial, ARIMA) were used to estimate the evolution of the share of renewable energy consumption into the final energy consumption, all of them showing an increasing trend for this indicator. The positive impact of the EU Directive in increasing this share was proved by means of a perturbed regression model. Forecasts of this share for the 2020 horizon were obtained, all showing that the EU target is yet to be reached. Secondly, four groups of EU-countries were considered, according to the final energy consumption. Empirical estimations of renewable energy share into the final energy consumption showed increasing trend for all groups, while providing forecasts quite different from the EU ones. Also, economic interpretations of the results are performed.
Highlights
The European Parliament has in recent years given an increasing importance to renewable energy sources, in terms of the need to prevent global warming, climate change, and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to protect the environment for future generations [1].through a series of adopted resolutions [2,3], the European Union (EU) has set as a primary objective the increase of energy production from renewable energy sources [4]
In a previous paper [9], analyzing the relations between economic growth, final energy consumption, and final energy consumption from renewable sources for EU countries, we found a positive impact of renewable energy consumption on economic growth and unidirectional or bidirectional Granger causalities between these macroeconomic indicators
In this paper, motivated by EU Directive 2009/28/EC stating the necessity to decrease final energy consumption while increasing the renewable energy consumption, such that its share into the final energy consumption should reach a target of 20% by 2020 in the EU countries, we analyzed the tendency of these shares and obtained forecasting, using a panel of data for 28 countries of European Union over a period from 1995 to 2016 and several regression models
Summary
The European Parliament has in recent years given an increasing importance to renewable energy sources, in terms of the need to prevent global warming, climate change, and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to protect the environment for future generations [1]. An estimate of the evolution of final energy consumption and final energy consumption from renewable resources can bring benefits to EU countries in order to take appropriate initiatives in favor of renewable energy sources, and to achieve the objective of increasing the share of clean energy to 20% of total consumption by 2020 [2]. The main aim of this paper is to forecast the ratio between the final energy consumption from renewable sources and final energy consumption inside. In the last section, conclusions of this study are made
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