[owenversteeg]

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe.

For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc.

You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.

[eigenspace]

It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage.

Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).

Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating.

So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies.

______

If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever

[owenversteeg]

I mostly agree. Certainly transportation is an obvious one. But of course there are still some losses; when you include all the losses in the system and cold weather you can easily get ~80% for EVs vs. ~30% for ICE cars. Heat pumps can be very efficient, but 5x more efficient than combustion/resistive heating (which is near 100%...) is not common in practice. 3x, sure, plenty of installations that get that or better in mild climates.

That said, those are two pretty large items. If we reached 90% electrification on both it would be a pretty big win: Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use and all heating/cooling (industry, building, agriculture) represents ~50%.

[grumbelbart]

Exactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating.

[natmaka]

There are quite good explanation published at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-definitions and https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

[holowoodman]

> Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).

Yes, but there are also future inefficient uses of renewables. E.g. when making iron, you heat the ore (iron oxides) with coke (refined sulfurless coal). The coke will provide extra heat and act as a reduction agent, separating the oxygen atoms from the iron oxides. Now you can do the same thing with hydrogen as the reduction agent to avoid producing CO2 and to avoid using fossil fuels. However, creating renewable hydrogen is atm only 30% efficient, storing and transporting it has losses. Even with possible improvements, that hydrogen will be a very inefficient and costly use of electricity, and at least half of it will always be wasted.

So in terms of total energy usage, making those kinds of industrial processes use hydrogen, we will have to at least double our electricity output. And a lot of that doubling will be wasted because of the inefficiency of electrolysis, as opposed to directly using coal or natural gas.

[adrianN]

Most power plants are less than 50% efficient.

[black_puppydog]

Nice link, thanks! Still, the renewables (I'm not counting nuclear and biofuels, but counting hydro and "other renewables") make up 21.1% of the total energy consumption as well, up from 13.3% in 2015. That's still quite marked.

Also after clicking the "settings" button to show absolute values, I was surprised to see that total energy consumption peaked in 2006 (hey, that's 20 years ago!) at ~18,900TWh, and is now at ~15,700TWh.

I'd guess that demand for Oil is so inflexible mostly due to its use in transportation? If that's the case, we should see this value drop as the adoption of EVs progresses, but clearly so far they haven't made a dent.

Edit: after clicking around a bit more, it seems that the EU energy use reduction might be mostly due to off-shoring energy intensive industries... ayayay. XD

[a_paddy]

Do not underestimate the impact of transitioning from incandescent to LED lighting. An average home could be consuming 1Kw for lighting alone at busy times.

[owenversteeg]

Yes, the EU offshored almost all the important parts of their manufacturing, which definitely contributed. There is an interesting series of graphs on the subject from the same website: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring

[anovikov]

Overall renewables (including the "bad" ones like biogas, and the finite ones like hydro) are at around 27% of TFC in EU today (25.2% in 2024 and growing at around 1% per year). Not bad. But far from replacement.

Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU though, it's just that the rest is imported.

[natmaka]

> Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU

I'm probably misunderstanding because:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-source-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked...

[etiennebausson]

And nuclear fuel is also imported (but refined locally), so not sure it should be counted as 'local' in this case.

[nandomrumber]

> The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. … and 7.8% for Europe.

Yes, the _!ONLY!_ thing is, this won’t move the needle at all on climate change.

Wind and solar for electric is the lowest of low hanging fruit.

No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions.

Lithium ion batteries, or a solid state alternative aren’t it. Not without being some orders of magnitude more energy dense and lighter. And you still need to electrify those sectors to be able to charge the batteries.

[korhojoa]

Confident talk, but that's not at all the reality that I'm seeing.

Public transport is almost completely electric powered where I live (ferries still haven't changed to electric, but it's coming.)

Trucking is electrified, as in, the operators have realzed that they're cheaper to run, so they are changing over when possible. (Sidenote: with some of the heaviest loads worldwide)

Very many agricultural buildings in active use either have, or are installing solar. Their energy usage is so high, that any offset to it is "free" money. Many have installed batteries also, so if there is an interruption in power delivery, there isn't an immediate need to start up a generator.

Electric tractors are also something I've heard them want. Less maintenance means less time spent not being able to work.

Sure, fertilizer and animal husbandry have other emissions which aren't tackled by this, but why exclude improvement just because some other area isn't affected.

[benjymo]

> No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions.

That's weird. In europe trains, trucks, light trucks busses and cars are bascially solved with EVs. There are even some early beginnings for heavy construction and agriculture machinery but it doesn't seem to be mass market yet. Electric ferries also start to pop up for smaller distances.

The biggest issues seem to be ships and planes. Not sure there are any good solutions there.