Monitoring Progress of Europe’s Renewable Energy

Challenge

The European Union (EU) is targeting 20% renewable energy for final energy consumption for 2020. The European Commission (EC) is required to report on the progress of the target biannually.

Solution

Guidehouse, together with Vienna University of Technology, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, Regional Centre for Energy Policy Research, and The European Council of Academies of Applied Sciences, Technologies, and Engineering, supported the EC in preparing their 2020 progress report on renewable energy.

For the report, Guidehouse monitored the progress of renewable energy deployment in all of Europe, including energy policies and barriers. For renewable energy, Guidehouse support included statistical progress in deployment, analysis of policy measures, non-economic barriers, and feasibility of renewable energy systems targets. Additionally, the team monitored the origin of bioenergy and their feedstock and assessed a range of upstream sustainability effects, total land use, impacts on commodity prices, and food security.

Impact

The report’s analysis showed that, at an EU-level, the shares of renewable energy sources in the electricity sector, the heating and cooling sector, and the transport sector have been continuously increasing over the past years. In 2018, the EU reached a share of 18% of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption, the target for 2020 being 20% as defined in the RES Directive 2009/28/EC (RED). A comparison of expected deployment with planned deployment of renewables by 2020 shows that the EU will likely succeed in meeting its binding renewables target with an expected share of renewables of 22%.

The majority of member states in Europe are expected to perform well in meeting or exceeding targets, however, for some member states, including Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Poland, current policy initiatives appear insufficient to trigger the required volumes of renewables to reach the binding 2020 RES targets domestically.

The EC used the analysis as a basis for their fifth Progress Report on Renewable Energy in Europe to the European Parliament and Council and in its State of the Energy Union Report. The project resulted in several reports published on the EC’s website that feed into the EC's 2020 report on renewable energy. Furthermore, the project’s findings fed into the State of the Energy Union Report.