The EU coal bounce is dead.
Let me explain why 🧵
First, why did coal rise earlier in the year?
Simple: there was a 7%(!) deficit in Europe's total generation in 2022 because of a nuclear and hydro shortfall.
Only 1/6 of that gap was made in coal...
Nuclear generation was the lowest since at least 2000.
Over 2/3rd's of the fall in nuclear was from French nuclear outages. A 1/3rd was from Germany's continuing nuclear phase out.
Hydro generation was also the lowest since at least 2000.
The biggest falls were in the France Spain and Italy, where there was a 1 in 500 year drought across much of the EU...
2/3rd's of the France nuclear/hydro deficit was made up in countries OUTSIDE of France, as France turned to the first time as an net importer of electricity...
Germany, Spain and the UK turned from importers of FR electricity to exporters...
How big was the coal rise in 2022?
⚫️+7% rise
⚫️From 15% to 16% of EU's elec mix
⚫️Added 0.3% to global coal gen
There were 26 coal units reactivated.
But the winter gas crunch was happened. They operated at only average 18% utilisation, adding <1% to EU coal generation in 2022...
Gas-to-coal switching wasn't really a thing in 2022... most of it had already happened in 2021...
The EU was perceived to be having a "coal rebound" in 2022 because it imported much more coal.
But only 1/3 of that extra coal was burnt.
2/3rds was implicitly added to stockpiles. It was bought as an emergency buffer for a winter gas crunch that didn't happen...
Coal (and gas) fell in the last months of 2022, and much of that was because of falling electricity demand...
Falling electricity demand was observed from October in all EU countries...
It was the surge in solar that was one of the biggest stories of 2022, that led to such a small rise in coal.
Solar generation increased twice as much as any other year. Almost 50% more capacity was installed in 2022 as in 2021.
Total generation (and capacity) was up 25%.
The solar surge will only pick up speed.
Do you remember when EU passed 100GW of solar in 2018? Well by 2022, it had doubled to over 200GW...
And @SolarPowerEU forecast it will double or even triple again by 2026...
2023 will be a VERY diferent story for fossil.
Fossil generation could fall a record 20% (211TWh) in 2023. This is x7 as big as 2022's rise in fossil.
Coal's fall is mostly assured in 2023. Gas (being more expensive that coal) is likely to fall VERY fast...
We ran the numbers this morning for y-o-y changes in the first 30 days of 2023..
🟢EU fossil gen fell 25%
🟢EU coal gen fell 11%
🟢EU gas gen fell 34%(!)
And the main finding: wind and solar overtook gas (and nuclear) to become the EU's biggest source of electricity generation in 2022..
(thanks to @CarbonBrief for the animation!)
The link to the full report is here. It's the 7th year we've written our Europe Electricity Review, and this year it's much bigger and better than ever...
(of course all the data is #opensource for you to analyse yourselves;))
ember-climate.org/insights/resea…
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