Chart: In a first, EU grid got more power from solar than coal in 2024

Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. 

In a major milestone, solar generated more electricity than coal in the European Union last year, according to new data from the think tank Ember. In 2024, solar provided 11% of the region’s power while coal dropped to 10%, marking the first time the clean energy source beat out coal. 

Meanwhile, gas generation fell for the fifth year in a row, and total fossil fuel use for electricity reached a historic low in the bloc’s 27 countries.

“Fossil fuels are losing their grip on EU energy,” Chris Rosslowe, senior analyst at Ember and lead author of the report, said in a statement. ​“Wind and solar are pushing coal to the margins and forcing gas into structural decline.”

Wind generation outpaced fossil gas for the second year in a row, contributing 17% of total electricity compared with 16% from gas. Overall, Ember found that renewables — including hydropower and bioenergy — provided 47% of the bloc’s power while fossil fuels supplied 29%. That’s a significant shift from 2019 when renewables made up 34% and fossil fuels supplied 39% of the electricity mix.

Over the last five years, the region’s energy transition ​“has moved faster than anyone expected,” Rosslowe said, thanks to the European Green Deal, a bundle of policies launched in 2019 that set a goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2050. Those policies span from clean energy to agriculture and were boosted by hundreds of billions of dollars in funding. The move from gas was further accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, although the EU has also ramped up imports of liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and other countries.

As solar and wind picked up, coal-fired generation fell to new lows. In 2019, coal was the EU’s third-biggest power source; in 2024, it fell to sixth. More than half of all EU countries now either use no coal for electricity or rely on it for less than 5% of their power.

That trajectory is a bit ahead of similar trends in the U.S., where solar and wind combined overtook coal on the power grid for the first time last year. Coal has been eliminated from the United Kingdom’s power system, which shuttered its last coal-fired power plant in September.

All this momentum in greening its grid has enabled the EU to more than halve emissions from the power sector from their 2007 peak. That’s largely on track with a target recommended by the International Energy Agency for the region to decarbonize its electricity by 2035, although researchers say progress needs to accelerate, particularly in the wind sector, to meet that goal.