The recarbonization of the European electric grid: The inevitable alternative to degrowth

What I’m going to explain in this article is as following:

If as Europeans we want to use electricity that does not result in the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, we will have to reduce the amount of electricity we use and move towards using electricity when it is available, rather than when we prefer to use it.

All indicators now suggest to me however, that we are doing the opposite: We are planning to increase our overall electricity use, particularly during periods when it is difficult for low-carbon sources of electricity to deliver us electricity.

The greenhouse gas intensity of the European electric grid decreased by 62% between 1990 and 2024, an impressive achievement. What I am arguing, is that with the path we are now choosing, we risk undoing this achievement of our parents generation. If we’re not willing to change how much electricity we use and when we use it, we will end up with dirtier electricity again.

Let us look at what our current plans are. By 2035, we want to move towards the sale of 100% electric vehicles. Under the REPowerEU plan, the EU also aims to reach 50 to 60 million new heat pump installations by 2030. Finally, we see a move towards widespread use of air conditioning, which is currently only available to 20% of our population. All these trends will force us to start using more electricity.

How much electricity are we talking about? Well, for renewable vehicles alone, you’re looking at an increase of ~570 TWh/year in electricity consumption if the entire car fleet went electric. Compared to the EU’s annual consumption of 2,749 TWh in 2023, that’s a roughly +20% increase in total electricity consumption. Add the use of air conditioning, the electrification of heavy industry and the electrification of heating in winter to this and you’re looking at a big increase in our overall use of electricity.

Why is that a problem? For that, we need to look at our current distribution of electricity sources:

There are two types of sources: Fossil and non-fossil. The fossil fuels are the ones we want to stop using, for reasons that should be obvious (global warming). So, if we want to increase our electricity use, we will have to add more of the non-fossil sources of electricity.

Unfortunately, that’s not easy. We have respectively, nuclear, bioenergy, hydropower, wind, solar and the vague category of “other renewables” that is so small that it doesn’t show up on the chart.

So, which direction are our renewable energy sources moving in? Nuclear is retiring, whether we like it or not. At least 90% of our fleet of nuclear power plants, is older than 35 years. Those plants become increasingly dangerous, as we extend their use beyond their originally planned timeline. We will eventually have to stop using them, but we’re not building new plants rapidly enough to replace the ones that will have to be retired. Even if we start building now, the median post-Chernobyl European nuclear power plant takes 13 years to be constructed.

Next, we have hydropower. Hydropower is not an option to expand in Europe either. Most economically viable sites for conventional dams in Europe are already tapped, we simply don’t have a lot of new places where we can generate additional hydropower left.

Then there is bioenergy. Currently it only delivers about 6% of our electricity. There are a bunch of problems associated with it: A lot of it is arguably just as bad for the planet as fossil fuels. We’re chopping down forests for biomass that will take decades to regrow, if they will regrow at all. Second, it can not be scaled: There is enormous use of land associated with bioenergy, that competes with the use of land for the production of food.

That leaves us with solar and wind. Wind is nearing saturation: We’re already harvesting a lot of wind and new wind turbines will tend to deliver electricity when existing wind turbines already deliver enough to meet our needs. In the Netherlands, no company is willing to build new wind turbines on sea, because there’s simply no real chance for them to see a return on their investment: Whenever these turbines can deliver electricity, the price for electricity will be very low.

With solar, you see effectively the same problem: We’re already using the sun to deliver us most of our electricity needs when it is available. It can not significantly expand to meet more of our needs anymore, without massive curtailment.

That raises the obvious question: Can’t we just store the electricity we need? Electricity storage unfortunately, is difficult and expensive. We have about ~100GW of electricity that we can store. Of this, 54 is pumped water storage, which is difficult to expand and only manages to deliver 70-80% of energy back to you that you put into it.

The main candidate is electrochemical storage, but these systems only store a few hours worth of electricity. Unfortunately, electrochemical storage has a huge mineral burden associated with it. The world simply does not have enough lead to meet a significant share of the electricity we would have to store, to get us through winter.

Hydrogen storage is in theory possible, but it’s very inefficient. When converting electricity to hydrogen and back to usable power, the process only yields about 35% to 45% of the original energy. I don’t expect that adding wind and solar that has to be stored in such a manner will prove to be economically viable.

It is estimated that 351 TWh of long-duration storage would be needed for Europe to get through an extreme Dunkelflaute event, a period in winter when there is insufficient solar energy available and the wind just refuses to blow simultaneously. In comparison, we had a total battery fleet of 77.3 GWh in late 2025. In other words, we have 0.02% of the electricity storage that we need, to get through winter. Even under a scenario of perfect electricity distribution throughout Europe, we have just 0.05% of the storage we need.

Change can happen quickly, but I don’t expect we’re going to increase our battery capacity 5000-fold in the next 24 years. Since storing electricity is hard and inefficient, an increase in electricity use during periods when wind and solar are simultaneously unavailable, will most likely be met by fossil fuels.

If we find ourselves increasing our electricity consumption during the summer evening by 50%, because everyone is using air conditioning during a period when solar and wind are unavailable, what’s most likely going to happen is that we’re going to be burning natural gas to generate the electricity we need.

Most worrisome however, is our dependence on electricity for heating. This will have the effect of increasing demand for electricity during the Dunkelflaute periods when solar and wind are unavailable for multiple days in a row.

So, what’s going to happen if we increase our electricity demand during periods when wind and solar are unavailable, is that we will be increasing our dependence on fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels will only become dirtier

This brings me to an important next point to understand: Fossil fuels tend to get worse as you use more of them. You first use the best fossil fuels to generate electricity. Once you run out of those, you start using worse fossil fuels. Those worse fossil fuels are the ones that have to be transported over longer distances, that have to receive chemical processing treatments before you can use them, that need more overburden removed before you can transport them, andsoforth.

What you see in America as an example, is that they gradually moved from using the best coal to generate electricity, towards increasingly worse forms of coal, that involve more CO2 emissions per unit of electricity generated:

So, if Europe finds itself forced to start using fossil fuels again, to meet increased demand for electricity during periods when wind and solar can’t help us out, we will be using dirtier fossil fuels than we would have been using in the past.

The Americans are very eager to get us to use their liquefied natural gas (LNG) to generate our electricity. It is estimated that by 2028, we will be getting two thirds of our LNG from the Americans. It is estimated to causes 35% more global warming per unit of electricity generated, than natural gas from Norway does:

One estimate even says that American natural gas exported to Europe involves so much methane leaking into the atmosphere, that it actually has a 33% higher global warming impact than if we would simply burn our own coal reserves.

My own suggestion is quite simple: We need to radically rethink how we’re going to be using electricity in the future.

-We have to move towards using electricity when the wind and the sun can deliver it to us.

-We have to limit the use of air conditioning to people with medical conditions that make them dependent on it.

-We have to discourage the ownership of private vehicles. Most people just don’t need to own a car, we can share a small fleet together and depend on bicycles and public transport for most of our transportation needs.

-We have to discourage the heating of entire buildings and instead move towards directly heating our own bodies during winter. We can use electric blankets, we can wear thicker clothing and we can drink hot drinks to heat ourselves.

If we are not willing to take these steps, what’s going to happen is that we will find ourselves burning growing amounts of American liquified natural gas and other dirty fossil fuels, which will cause us to undo the progress our parents generation made towards decarbonizing our electric grid.