33
votes
European electricity review - For the first time the EU produced more electricity from renewables than fossil sources in 2025
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- Title
- European Electricity Review 2026 | Ember
- Word count
- 288 words
This is a pivotal point: solar is surging, batteries are at the brink of a breakthrough and sodium ion batteries are going to accelerate that even further at the end of this year. This is all happening after the EU pivoted from Russian gas to US imports which is also not great given recent events. The way forward is crystal clear, to me anyway: solar, wind combined with battery storage will dominate, with sources like hydro, geothermal mixing in depending on geography. As for nuclear: it makes sense to keep them going, but they are barely economically viable today, let alone by the time a new reactor would be finished in a ~10 years. I personally don't see SMRs making a big difference due to the astronomical speed at which solar and storage is dropping in price.
I'm slightly more optimistic about the use-case of SMRs as a way to fill the baseline electricity demand such as the overnight usage. Surely only consistent alternatives would be geothermal and hydro, but those are quite location-dependent (and hydro dams have their own issues with habitat destruction).
Maybe a large wind turbine network would be able to compensate for localised dead-spots?
Obviously much smarter people than me have thought about how to solve overnight generation, I just don't know what their conclusions are.
In a way, yes. The thing is though, if storage gets cheap enough, simply building more renewables with more storage is cheaper than and about as reliable as SMRs. Also, shifting electricity use is a big part of the solution, because many of the big consumers can be shifted in time (heatpumps, evs etc). Tha being said, some baseload will always be required so maybe they can fill in there, I just think it's a lot less than people think.