Solar and wind power outperformed fossil fuels in the European Union for the first time last year, a new high watermark on Europe’s transition to green and autonomous energy.
The two sources of energy generated 30 percent of EU electricity, compared with 29 percent for coal and gas, Ember, a global energy think tank, said on Thursday in its European Electricity Review.
Recommended Stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
Report author Beatrice Petrovich said the “milestone moment” demonstrated Europe’s rapid transition away from greenhouse gas-emitting fuels.
If hydroelectricity and electricity generated from decaying agricultural and food waste, known as biomass, were to be added, the renewables’ share of the electricity market rose to 48 percent.
Nuclear power, which is emissions-free, generated another 23 percent of EU power.
What’s behind the solar power surge?
This positive tipping point for Europe was reached thanks to an annual one-fifth surge in solar power for four years running, partly driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its cutoff of pipeline gas to Europe.
Much of Europe’s transition has happened, not due to large investments in industrial-scale solar and wind farms, but thanks to rooftop photovoltaic panels installed on homes, Ember has said.
Recent research suggested that this is still an underused pathway to energy autonomy, and that rooftop solar panels can cover 40 percent of EU needs.
Solar and wind energy have been growing at record annual rates for 23 years according to the International Energy Agency, the world’s leading energy think tank, claiming an ever-growing share of the electricity market. Because the electricity market was growing as a whole, there was room for coal and gas use to grow as well. That has now changed, said Ember.
Last October, it was assessed that in 2025, solar and wind power outgrew the electricity market for the first time, and began to take market share away from fossil fuels worldwide.
This global transition away from fossil fuels manifested itself as a large, simultaneous drop in coal use in China and India last year, two of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.
In China, coal-fired power fell by 1 percent, the first drop in a decade.
‘So much capacity being added’
Ember said solar power has grown in 14 of the EU’s 27 member states, but some industry insiders warned that too much ambition could backfire.
“In Greece, in 2025, we reached an installed capacity [of solar photovoltaics] of 12GW, up from 9.5GW in 2024, a 25 percent leap,” said Stelios Loumakis, president of the Association of Photovoltaic Energy Producers in Greece. “As a result, a quarter of the power we generated was cut out by the grid,” he told Al Jazeera, because supply exceeded demand.
“We expect that to rise to 40 percent this year. So what we’re doing is furiously adding capacity while producers lose income,” he said.
“There is now so much capacity being added that a lot of these investors are going to go bankrupt,” Loumakis told Al Jazeera. “The only way to avoid that is to install a lot of electricity storage, but what is currently under construction is still much too little.”
There was also bad news in the United States, where emissions rose by 2.4 percent last year after two years of declines, due to a rise in coal-fired generation, Axios reported, citing research by the Rhodium Group.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has pledged not to shut down any coal-fired electricity plants, and has been cancelling licences for offshore wind and onshore solar parks. The US also plans to pull back $24bn in federal subsidies to climate projects awarded by the previous Biden administration.
In March, Ember said the US “remains far behind the European Union”, as wind and solar power generated 17 percent of its electricity in 2024.
Some of Trump’s reversals are being struck down in the courts.
Federal judges ordered the resumption of construction of large wind parks offshore New York and Virginia this month, and more Trump administration injunctions were being fought in the courts.
Legislation and litigation are key tools in making the clean energy transition irreversible, recent research has shown.
