European Union (EU) and alternative energy

Summary: The European Union is a political and economic alliance of European nations that was originally founded to facilitate cross-border cooperation in the coal and steel sectors. The EU has become a leader in developing alternative energy sources and addressing global climate change.

The predecessor organization to the European Union, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), was created by six countries—France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—in 1952. Its original vision was to prevent future European political conflicts by developing cooperative trade relationships between the participating countries through a common market in coal and steel, two of Europe’s primary industrial sectors. In this cooperative venture, tariffs and other trade barriers were eliminated, and efficiencies of scale and reductions in duplication of services could be achieved, thereby boosting the economic competitiveness not only of the member countries but also of the region as a whole.

The ECSC experienced immediate success, and as a result the member countries expanded its purview beyond coal and steel to allow cross-border movement of other goods, labor, and capital. This change was codified in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and the new organization was called the European Economic Community, or simply the Common Market. Additional forms of governmental structure, such as courts and the European Commission, were created by treaty in 1965, and the organization was renamed the European Community (EC). Four additional countries joined the EC in 1973: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland, and Norway—although Norwegian voters subsequently rejected membership in a referendum vote. Throughout the 1980s, Greece, Portugal, and Spain joined the EC. Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined in 1995, bringing the total membership to fifteen countries.

A major reorientation of EC governmental power was effected in 1991 with the Treaty of Maastricht. Although economic integration continued to be a cornerstone of the EU mission, the alliance moved toward common foreign and domestic policies as well, committing to mutual security and a shared vision for human rights. The Treaty of Maastricht also renamed the alliance the European Union (EU).

In 2004 the EU underwent its largest geographic expansion, adding ten countries, mainly those formerly in the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. In 2007, Romania and Bulgaria became member countries, and Croatia joined the EU in 2013, bringing the total membership to twenty-eight countries. However, in 2016 the United Kingdom held a referendum in which UK citizens voted for the country to leave the EU—a process nicknamed Brexit, which was finalized in 2020.

Traditional Energy Sources

Early industrialization in the countries of the European Union was fueled by local coal deposits: in the United Kingdom; in the border areas between Belgium, France, and Germany; and in the border area between Poland and the Czech Republic. While coal would continue to be used for electrical generation and heating, this became much less common in the twenty-first century. Two other fossil fuels, oil (petroleum) and natural gas, became increasingly vital sources of energy for transportation, electrical generation, and industrial production. This increased the EU’s reliance on foreign energy sources. Other than the oil and natural gas fields under the North Sea, Europe does not have significant deposits of oil and natural gas.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, more than 50 percent of the EU’s energy came from sources outside the EU. This figure stood at about 61 percent in 2019. However, the percentage varied widely from country to country. Some nations such as Malta and Luxembourg relied on imports for over 90 percent of their energy, while others such as Estonia imported only about 5 percent. In 2019, the largest sources of crude oil for the EU were Russia (27 percent), Iraq (9 percent), Nigeria and Saudi Arabia (8 percent each), and Kazakhstan and Norway (7 percent each). The largest sources of natural gas were Russia (41 percent), Norway (16 percent), Algeria (8 percent) and Qatar (5 percent). The EU's heavy reliance on Russia for energy imports proved especially problematic as political tensions increased between the EU and Russia in the 2010s and 2020s. After Russia invaded Ukraine (a nation that had expressed interest in joining the EU) in 2022, EU leaders accelerated efforts to shift away from Russian oil and especially natural gas, instead prioritizing domestic renewable energy sources. Notably, Germany, which had previously fostered especially close ties with Russian natural gas producers, halted the massive Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. In 2023, the United States became the EU's second-largest crude oil supplier, after Norway.

Another important source of energy for the EU has been nuclear power. In 1957, the member nations of the ECC established the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in order to cooperate on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The agencies of Euratom provide a collaborative arena for research; develop and administer safety regulations; facilitate and safeguard access to the supply of nuclear materials; oversee standards for transport of nuclear materials; and regulate disposal of nuclear waste. Euratom oversees an ambitious nuclear research program with both fission and fusion components. According to the World Nuclear Association, nuclear plants generated about 22 percent of the EU's total electricity in 2022.

Renewable Energy Sources

Concerns about the volatility of fossil fuel prices, coupled with growing awareness of the environmental harm caused by burning fossil fuels, have spurred the EU to develop and implement alternative energy resources, including wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy sources as well as biomass. The EU aggressively pursued the development of renewable energy sources in accordance with its mission to reduce dependence on foreign energy markets, reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, diversify its energy portfolio, and create jobs through the development of new energy technologies. The development of targets for renewable energy sources is managed through the European Commission, which is the executive branch of EU government, and specifically through the Directorate-General for Energy, one of the several policy-area departments within the commission. The EU adopted a revision of its Renewable Energy Directive in 2023, which set a goal of 42.5 percent renewable energy by 2030. In 2022, 23 percent of its energy came from renewable sources.

One of the fastest-growing renewable energy sources in the early twenty-first century was wind power. According to the European Commission, cumulative wind power capacity in the EU increased by an average of 32 percent per year in the period between 1995 and 2005. In 2007, wind power constituted 6.4 percent of all onshore energy use in the EU. In 2015 wind power overtook hydropower as the third-largest source of power generation in the EU, with a 15.6 percent share of total power capacity. According to the European Commission, wind power accounted for 37.5 percent of the total electricity generated from renewable sources in 2022.

An emerging focus was offshore installations, including in the deep waters of the North Sea, where it is difficult to stabilize the turbines and to deal with the formation of sea ice on the blades but steady winds hold promise for substantial energy generation. The EU funded demonstration projects incorporating innovative technologies for deepwater use, as well as deploying ever larger turbines: A demonstration project for the world’s first 7-megawatt turbine was built in Estinnes-Mons, Belgium. To accerlate the development of offshore wind energy, the European Commission unveiled its EU Wind Power Package in 2023. The majority of EU countries signed a European Wind Charter agreement during the same year. The EU set a goal of having a capacity of at least 60 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 300 GW by 2050.

Solid biofuels and renewable waste was the largest component of primary production of renewable energy in the EU in 2021, contributing 59 percent of primary renewables production, followed by hydropower and wind energy. Biomass is the burning of solid, liquid, or gas wastes from plants, and in the EU about 90 percent of biomass used for energy production is from forestry waste or from by-products of other industries. The carbon dioxide produced in combustion may be offset by the carbon that was absorbed by the plants during their growth, but the exact net carbon savings depends on the agricultural methods and the efficiency of the combustion process. The European Commission created a Biomass Action Plan, in which it identified local residents’ resistance to biomass plants and complex or conflicting permit processes as the primary impediments to increasing this component of renewable energy production.

Another notable renewable energy resource is solar energy. Solar contributed only 0.1 percent of the EU’s total electricity generated from renewable energy sources in 2004, but by 2023 that figure had risen to 9 percent. The European Commission established two parallel paths for development of solar power: photovoltaic (PV) cells and concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies (in which solar rays are focused and concentrated to produce electricity). In 2023 the EU produced 243.5 terawatts of photovoltaic electricity, which was three times the amount in produced in 2012. Barriers to increasing solar power include the relatively high costs of the technology and the difficulties of adapting the technology to large-scale applications. The EU-sponsored DESERTEC program researched the feasibility of large-scale installations of CSP technology in northern Africa and the Middle East, with the power produced there to be exported to EU countries.

Global Climate Change

Along with diversification of its energy portfolio to include a much higher proportion of renewable sources and reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuels, the EU has made reduction of greenhouse gases a priority in energy policy and planning. In 2007 the EU set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020, with a target of reducing overall energy consumption by 20 percent by 2020 by improving the efficiency of appliances and machines. In 2014 greenhouse gas emissions in the EU had fallen by 22.9 percent from 1990 levels. The EU countries together accounted for 10 percent of global emissions in 2015, and data released in 2020 suggested that figure had fallen to 8 percent by 2018. The EU continued to set goals regarding climate change into the 2020s. It aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent from 1990s levels by 2030 and by 90 percent by 2040. It also planned to achieve net neutraility by 2050.

The EU has also taken a proactive stance on implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. The original fifteen member countries (before 2004) agreed collectively to reduce greenhouse gases to 8 percent below the levels of the Kyoto Protocol base year (1990), and the individual national contributions were worked out given the population sizes and economic situations in the various member countries. In addition, ten of the twelve new accession countries (after 2004) were tasked with meeting a target reduction of 6 or 7 percent in greenhouse gases. These goals were to be achieved, in part, through the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), in which 11,000 power plants and other carbon-intensive enterprises have a cap on the amount of carbon emissions they can produce. However, they are allowed to sell their excess capacity or buy additional capacity on the carbon market. The EU also funded research on carbon capture and storage, with the goal of developing commercially viable methods to sequester carbon that can be deployed at large scales.

Bibliography

Birchfield, Vicki L., and John S. Duffield. Toward a Common European Union Energy Policy: Progress, Problems, and Prospects. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Birnbaum, Michael, and Steven Mufson. "EU Will Unveil a Strategy to Break Free from Russian Gas, After Decades of Dependence." The Washington Post, 24 Feb. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/02/23/russia-ukraine-eu-nordstream-strategy-energy/. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

Cooban, Anna. "US Has Replaced Russia as Europe's Top Crude Oil Supplier," CNN,www.cnn.com/2023/03/28/energy/eu-us-oil-imports-overtake-russia/index.html. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

European Commission. EU Energy in Figures: Statistical Pocketbook 2017. European Union, 2017, ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/documents/pocketbook‗energy‗2017‗web.pdf. Accessed 1 aug. 2024.

European Union. “Climate Change: What Is It All About?” Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2009. PDF file.

European Union. “Energy Policy for a Competitive Europe.” Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2010. Web.

"From Where Do We Import Energy?" Eurostat, 2022, ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy‗2022/bloc-2c.html. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

Global Wind Energy Council. Global Wind Report 2015. Brussels: Global Wind Energy Council, 2016. PDF file.

"Nuclear Power in the European Union." World Nuclear Association, 1 Feb. 2024, world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/others/european-union. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

"Renewable Energy." European Commission, 2022, energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/renewable-energy‗en. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

"Renewable Energy Statistics." Eurostat, European Commission, Jan. 2022, ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Renewable‗energy‗statistics. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

"Renewable Energy Targets." European Commission, 2022, energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/renewable-energy/renewable-energy-directive-targets-and-rules/renewable-energy-targets‗en. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.