Renewable Energy In The European Union: Evolutions And Challenges

Under the current international climate, the energy security remains intrinsically linked to competitive economic development. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the following energy crisis in the European Union (EU), generated by the energy bans imposed to the Russian Federation as a result of the sanctions, highlighted that the dependence on fossil fuels (especially their imports) represents a major vulnerability for the European economy. Hence, the Green Deal objectives related to increasing the share of renewable energies in the total energy consumption at EU level, reveal, once more, their strategic importance for the future of EU development. The objective of this paper is to present the progress made at EU level regarding the use of renewable energies for consumption, electricity, transport, and heating/cooling, using the latest data published by Eurostat. Our main conclusion is that, in the last ten years, notable progress has been made both at the EU level and in the Member States, while Romania ranks well in the EU hierarchy. The limits of our research are related to the fact that the most recently available data are published for the year 2021, making it difficult to estimate what was the impact of the energy crisis produced by the war in Ukraine on this sector. Hence, we propose an expansion of the current research, as new data become available, as well as a more detailed analysis of the challenges related to the development of renewable energies facing Member States in the current global economic outlook.