How fast can Europe get off Russian gas?
Last week, the EU announced a target to be free of Russian fossil fuels by 2030. As European countries face this goal, two questions arise:
Is it sufficiently ambitious and realistic? and
Will this support or compromise our climate goals?
In this post, I focus on replacing Russian gas, where the largest dependence on Russia and inflexible supply infrastructure are the largest threat. I ask whether such switch can be done faster than the announced plan and whether it will bring us closer or farther away from our climate goals.
In 2020, the European Union imported 155 bcm of natural gas from Russia (142 bcm through pipelines and 14 bcm through LNG). This is down from 2019 but still accounts for about a third of European natural gas demand.
By our calculations, EU countries use about 30% of natural gas for electricity production and the rest for heating and industry. This means that Europe uses approximately as much natural gas in electricity as it imports from Russia. This observation, also made by Anne-Sophie Corbeau of Columbia University, means that if Europe can stop using natural gas in electricity production, it could stop gas imports from Russia. Replacing gas in electricity production is easier than in other sectors because alternative technologies are widely available. To replace gas in electricity, the EU would need to add at least 230 GW of wind power (compared to 180 GW today) or 320 GW of solar power (150 GW today), or 100 GW of nuclear (100 GW today), or 133 GW of bioenergy (42 GW today) (see Methods).
How fast can that happen? To answer this question, we looked at both recent and historical growth rates of wind, solar, nuclear and bioenergy. For each technology, we looked at the average growth rate in the EU over the last five years as well as the maximum historical rate of deployment in individual EU countries. For the latter, we used the method that we recently developed to fit S-curves to growth of new energy technologies described in our Nature Energy article and available in our visualization tool. (Btw: If you want to fit curves yourself, all our code is public).
We found that if the EU expands wind power at its the recent rate of 12 GW a year, it would need some 19 years to replace all Russian gas. This is similar but shorter than the estimate by Anne-Sophie Corbeau for Europe as a whole (including Turkey and other non-EU European countries), who assesses the needed capacity for 370 GW and a recent growth rate of 14 GW/year, meaning that it would take 26 years.
If all of EU countries can accelerate to the fastest rates ever observed, the time to replace Russian gas with wind would take less, about a decade. To take some real national examples, if all countries could achieve Germany’s recent growth in on-shore wind energy, then it would take only 13 years. If we include Germany’s off-shore wind growth as well (which has a bit more uncertainty because off-shore growth is still accelerating and only a few European countries have access to suitable sea floor), it would take only 8 years. Spain is also a good analogue with rapid growth, which occurred from about 2005 to 2010, and if all EU countries could achieve that growth rate, it would take about 9 years.
Turning to solar PV, if Europe continues with the recent growth of 11 GW/year, it would take 29 years to replace electricity from natural gas with solar PV. If we could all accelerate to the German rate, achieved around 2010, we could all accomplish it within 10 years.
Our estimates for replacing gas with wind and solar power do not take into account the problem of intermittency, which may be significant at such penetration levels and may be a reason for the higher estimate of necessary wind capacity reported by Ann-Sophie Corbeau.
Nuclear power has not recently increased in Europe, however, a number of European countries have plans to expand or renew their nuclear power fleets including the Netherlands, France, Romania, Poland, and Czechia. Most of these plans preceded the current crisis, however nuclear plans are notoriously fickle and the current fears over energy security will make these more likely to be realized.
If Europe can replicate its own maximum rate of deployment of nuclear power (which happened from the late 70s to early 80s), it could push out Russian gas out within 6 years. If Europe can replicate some of the faster rates, like those historically observed in Sweden, it could push out Russian gas within three years. However, one thing to keep in mind with nuclear power is no matter how motivated countries are, there will be an inevitable delay before deployment of nuclear power can be ramped up to high speeds, especially since Europe has not been constructing nuclear power plants recently. Optimistically the delay in ramping up a nuclear build out in Europe will be anywhere from five to ten years.
Bioenergy (including solid biomass, biogas, liquid biofuel and renewable municipal waste) expansion is another option but according to our calculations, historical experience does not offer a rapid switch. The recent expansion in bioenergy is relatively slow at about 1.5 GW/year which would take some 90 years to replace Russian gas. If all countries in Europe achieved the UK’s rate, one of the highest among EU28 countries, that could drop to 20 years. However, this looks less likely given concerns over food security arising from the recent crisis.
These calculations do not take into account that more electricity will be needed to electrify harder-to-decarbonize sectors like transport, heating, and industry. Sweden for example plans to expand the electricity system some 50% by 2050 and Germany expects electricity demand to grow by 25% by 2030. On the one hand such decarbonisation may reduce the need for gas in the end-use sectors by for example replacing gas heating by heat pumps. On the other hand, producing more electricity would increase the challenge for substituting gas in electricity that we analyse above.
However, the good news is that these calculations also don’t consider the demand-side responses and switching to other gas suppliers. Reducing gas demand by ramping up energy efficiency could allay demand in other sectors. Additionally, gas from Russia can be replaced by increasing imports of liquified natural gas (LNG) from other regions. Some 50 bcm of LNG are under construction and another 300 bcm are in some form of planning in Europe. However, it’s important to keep in mind that while LNG can provide a buffer, a full switch is not an option because the EU imports alone would today eat up about half of the global LNG market.
So is the EU’s plan to get off of Russian gas within eight years realistic? Yes. It is optimistic and will take effort but it can be done.
Will these transformations increase or decrease Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions? Over the short-term, it looks likely that emissions will increase as countries consider walking back their coal phase-out commitments. However, over the medium and long-term, energy security threats may accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. It is possible that the current crisis will replicate the high government commitment to transforming electricity supply in the 1970s and 80s, when the most rapid decline of fossil fuels in electricity occurred following the oil crises.
Methods
To compare growth of electricity generation technologies across countries and regions of different sizes or in different periods of time, we use capacity growth rates normalized to the electricity system size (total electricity supply) [also described in this post]. For each energy source, we identify the countries with the highest growth rates and which we believe are representative of broader European conditions and omit outlier countries with small electricity systems and/or special conditions. For example, for wind, we use Germany and Spain for our maximum national rate, but not Ireland and Portugal which we regard as special cases with particularly good geography for wind and which are smaller. Similarly, for nuclear power, we use Sweden but not France, which is an outlier case with its centralized energy planning which has historically been supportive of nuclear power.
We use electricity demand for 2019 the European electricity system (EU28) since 2020 was a lower year for demand due to COVID. We assume a capacity factor of 35% for wind power, for solar we assume a capacity factor of 25%, for nuclear power we assume a capacity factor of 80%, and for bioenergy we assume a capacity factor of 60%.