Three years into the Ukraine war, is Europe’s energy system cleaner?

When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, it ignited an energy crisis that threatened to upend Europe.

The continent relied on Russia for much of its gas supply for electricity and heating. Suddenly, European consumers faced soaring fuel prices, which rewarded Russia for the very chaos it had caused. European leaders became determined to find replacements for Russian fossil fuels, so they could stop paying the aggressor to fund its own war effort.

Climate activists argued for seizing the opportunity to hasten Europe’s clean energy transition by building more renewables and electrifying gas heating, and the European Commission linked the ​“double urgency” of climate action and energy security in its 2022 REPowerEU plan. That proposal called for upping the EU target for renewables from 40% to 45% of total energy use by 2030 — meaning not just in electricity production but buildings, transport, and industry too.

Now that three years have passed, it’s worth taking stock of just how Europe has fared with these ambitious goals.

The continent has indeed radically reduced dependence on an aggressive Russia to keep its lights on and its homes heated, and it has cut overall usage of fossil fuels since the war began, especially in the power sector.

“Russian pipeline flows have been reduced to a trickle in Europe,” said Olympe Mattei, a gas analyst at research firm BloombergNEF’s London bureau.

That decimation of energy flows from Russia represents a huge geopolitical success for Europe, one that would have been hard to envision prior to the war. Meanwhile, the EU is consuming less gas now than it did three years ago, and its electricity system in particular has grown successively cleaner. Structural changes to permitting for renewables projects and support for electric heat pump adoption will continue to speed up the transition, even though the immediate energy crisis has passed.

Of course, many factors outside of climate policy enabled this outcome.

American shipments of liquefied natural gas took the place of much of that Russian fuel, swapping one country’s planet-warming fossil fuels for another’s. Some factories shut down or moved overseas rather than operate with such high energy costs. The energy price spike acted as an unintended carbon price, pushing consumers to limit gas combustion out of financial necessity. Relatively mild winters also offered reprieve from ruinous heating bills.

In short, many of the factors driving down gas demand were entirely separate from muscular climate policies, and not necessarily permanent. As a result, the aggressive decarbonization that many had envisioned has not been fully realized.

“You might say, ​‘Well, it would be nice if they changed more,’” said Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at U.K. think tank Ember. ​“But the point to me is, change has been sped up, clearly as a result of the Russian invasion.”

Europe cut total gas demand and replaced most Russian imports

Europe uses gas for many things: generating electricity, heating buildings, supplying heavy industry. Over the last three years, Europe has managed to lower its total gas demand while almost zeroing out the gas it gets from Russia.

Europe consumed about 400 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas in 2021, the full year before Russia invaded Ukraine, per Energy Institute data. That number fell by about 80 bcm, or 20%, through 2023, and preliminary data suggests that lower demand held steady through 2024, said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, global research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“Meanwhile, we lost around 110 bcm of Russian pipeline gas [through 2024],” she added. ​“So the maths is easy to do.”

Europe imported about 140 bcm of Russian pipeline gas in 2021, before the war. That fell to just 30 bcm in 2024. Then, at the start of 2025, Ukraine stopped allowing Russian gas to move through its territory, pushing total Russian pipeline imports down to just 15 bcm — a mere tenth of prewar levels. Europe also got about 21 bcm from Russian liquefied natural gas last year, reflecting some growth for that sector.

Corbeau cautioned against attributing too much to electrification and renewables policies. Those efforts made a mark in the power sector, but in many cases industry cut back on gas consumption because factories couldn’t afford to operate. Industrial gas demand fell about 20% from 2021 to 2023, Corbeau said.

“A lot of the industrial gas demand is structural and won’t [be] coming back,” Corbeau said. ​“In 2025, we might see [demand] destruction again and as you know, this issue of [industrial] competitiveness is a big one in Europe.”

Lowering gas consumption at the expense of a thriving industrial sector is not the kind of trade-off European leaders want to make. Indeed, they finalized a Clean Industrial Deal last month to show that decarbonization can proceed without snuffing out factories entirely, but that policy has not had time to make an impact yet.

The question lingering over the top-line gas decrease is whether it will persist.

Gas consumption plummeted amid the 2022 price spike, said Sofia Perelli-Rocco, an energy transition analyst at BNEF. ​“But that was really driven by high prices and milder than usual weather,” Perelli-Rocco noted. ​“As prices ease off, we expect demand for gas to pick up again.”

Clean energy surges across European power sector

European nations have succeeded best at driving gas out of their electricity supply.

Steady advances in solar and wind installations helped renewables generate 47% of the EU’s electricity in 2024. Coupled with the continent’s nuclear plants — the single largest power source in the region — carbon-free generators made 71% of Europe’s electricity last year, while fossil fuels produced 29%.

Fossil-fuel generation fell 9% in 2024, to the lowest level in more than four decades, per analysis firm Ember. Coal dropped nearly 16%, such that solar produced more power than coal for the first time in EU history last year. Gas generation fell by nearly 6%, continuing its five-year losing streak. And these declines can’t be blamed on falling demand, because electricity consumption actually increased slightly, as did exports to non-EU nations. Fossil fuels took a shrinking slice of a growing pie.

In long-term metrics, Europe’s power system now emits less than half the carbon emissions it gushed at its peak in 2007. Ember calculated Europe’s carbon intensity at 213 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, far below that of the U.S. at 361 grams of CO2 per kWh.

The initial urgency around reducing gas demand may have subsided, but renewables developers will continue to benefit from structural reforms to streamline permitting.

The REPowerEU plan stressed speeding up permits for clean energy construction, but it fell to each member state to implement that principle in its national law, Perelli-Rocco explained. This created some success stories: Germany prioritized renewables construction over other interests in permitting discussions. Italy, by contrast, gave siting power to regional governments, which let some regions slow or ban renewables entirely, Perelli-Rocco added.

Heat pumps leapt ahead, at least temporarily

Some 40% of Europe’s gas demand is used in commercial and residential buildings, where it mostly goes toward heating, Perelli-Rocco noted. Europe’s primary vector to reduce gas demand in heating was to boost adoption of highly efficient electric heat pumps.

“If you were able to convert the majority of heating to heat pumps, you would see a major reduction in demand,” Perelli-Rocco said.

Early efforts got rapid results after the Ukraine invasion: European heat pump sales shot up 40% from 2021 to 2022, Perelli-Rocco said. They maintained that level in 2023, achieving roughly 2.8 million installations.

“Now that gas prices are decreasing, though, it seems like numbers for 2024 were down quite significantly,” she said. Even sales of a few million a year are ​“way too low” to decarbonize Europe’s stock of some 200 million households.

The price of heat pumps is coming down as manufacturing volume goes up, said Bond, who has researched the learning curves exhibited by these and other clean energy technologies. But he urged policymakers to do more about a different cost-driver for heat pumps: the price of electricity.

“Stop messing around with subsidies for the capital costs, and get the price of electricity down,” he said. ​“They need to be rejigging the price of electricity versus the price of gas. That’s the absolutely key thing here.”

Many European nations have been ​“loading costs onto electricity and subsidies onto gas,” he explained. This inflates the cost of electricity with programs to account for the negative impacts of carbon emissions, thereby making fossil gas look more attractive as a heating fuel. High gas prices also have pushed up electricity prices because gas power plants often set the wholesale price at a given time.

​“I’m a little bit uninspired by the fact that we have European policymakers talking about buying more gas from Russia and opening up so much LNG demand, but actually what they should be doing is talking about pushing gas faster out of the electricity mix and increasing heat pump demand,” Bond said.

What does the future hold for Europe’s clean energy transition?

The fate of Europe’s Green Deal climate policies, adopted in 2019, looks less certain in light of recent electoral shifts. In the U.S., President Donald Trump is pressuring other countries to buy more American LNG or face trade penalties.

But Trump is also taking a sledgehammer to alliances and trade relationships alike, threatening the assurances that Europe needs if it will continue to depend heavily on imported fuels. Between war in Ukraine and trade wars across the Atlantic, Europe’s status quo reliance on imports looks increasingly fraught.

“Europe stands out for its vulnerability,” noted strategists at private equity firm Carlyle in a March report on the changing energy security landscape. ​“Its import dependence has only grown over time, as local fossil fuel production shrunk while non-fossil supply growth hasn’t grown nearly fast enough.”

Over the last decade, European countries and investors were willing to shoulder a ​“green premium” to pay up for low-carbon energy. The emerging era may instead put a premium on locally sourced energy that is immune to disruption in global trade, the report argues. Now Europe has a proof point for how quickly it can shift from imported fuels to that locally produced clean energy.