Every January since 2015, Ember (formerly Sandbag) has published an update on Europe’s Power Transition, and for the first time, we provide a 6-month mini-review to help explain the extent and reasoning of the huge fall in Europe’s coal generation in 2019. To do this, Ember curated 20 gigabytes of power operator data from ENTSO-E, and then condensed the most important data to a handy 2MB excel to download from our website so you can also analyse it yourself – please let us know what you find!

Coal generation in the EU collapsed by 19% in the first half of this year, with falls in almost every coal-burning country.

Half of coal’s fall was replaced by wind and solar, and half was replaced by switching to fossil gas. If this continues for the rest of the year it will reduce CO2 emissions by 65 million tonnes compared to last year, and reduce EU’s GHG by 1.5%. Coal generation already had fallen 30% from 2012 to 2018.

However, even if these falls continued in 2019, coal generation is still likely to account for 12% of the EU’s 2019 greenhouse gas emissions.