Ember Climate is a renewable energy advocacy group in Europe. This week, it issued a report which claims electricity from solar energy resources saved Europeans $29 billion this summer. Let’s take look at the numbers. Europe derived 12% (99.4 TWh) of its electricity this summer from solar resources. That’s up from 9% (77.7 TWh) last summer. Solar surpassed the share of wind (12%) and hydro (11%) in the power mix and was not far from coal’s 16%.
Without the record 99 TWh of solar generation over the past four months, the EU would have had to purchase another 20 billion cubic meters of unnatural gas, most of it from Russia. Based on the daily gas prices for May to August, this equates to avoided gas costs of €29 billion. (Note: the price of unnatural gas has skyrocketed this year thanks to Russia’s criminal attack on Ukraine.)
Ember says solar records were broken in 18 out…
Solar Energy Saved Europeans $29 Billion This Summer
