If mass renewables (excl hydro for obvious reasons) is only gaining traction in the past 20 years and there is a solid goal to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewables, every year should be the fossil fuels’ lowest share in the power mix right?
First of all weather changes and that can have a big impact in the EU as the share of wind and solar is high enough to overshadow that. That can also be true for hydro, if there is too little rainfall. Even nuclear was impacted by too low river waterlevels in France last year. Then you have economic growth or crisis. That can have a massive impact on electricity consumption. If you consume less you shut down the most expensive plants to run and that are fossil fuels due to fuel costs.
So it does not fall every year, but over a longer period of time it does go down.
So it does not fall every year, but over a longer period of time it does go down
A misleading claim since much of this is driven by deindustrialization. But the factories still exist, just in other countries:
https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-set-to-remain-at-record-levels-in-2023
Global fossil fuel consumption is still going to break records and will continue to do so.
Electricty generation in the EU is up since 1990 by 23%. The EUs consumption based emissions are higher then production based ones, both have fallen over the last three decades. .
We are talking about EU fossil fuel electricity here and that is indeed going down, not due to lower electricity consumption, but due to more low carbon electricity. At least long term it is.
Meanwhile, Belgium is phasing out nuclear in favor of gas burning plants
