Good, but not nearly good enough. Plenty of countries are resisting for political reasons. Poland is the worst offender - and they say "if you keep pressing people will elect PiS again" - which is actually, true, so there isn't much to be done about it, better have coal plants working than PiS in power.
"Explosive growth in solar power means most EU countries will hit their 2030 renewable energy targets ahead of time, new data shows, fuelling optimism on efforts to bring down global emissions. The bloc added 41 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2022 — a 40 percent increase on 2021. That's expected to rise to over 50 GW this year. Some 23 countries are slated to reach their solar installation targets by 2027, according to data from the SolarPower Europe lobby group based on the latest available national targets and shared with POLITICO."
I cannot overstate how phenomenal this is, and various renewables and storage trajectories are still bending towards vertical.
Yeah and that's even old data, a year old. In fact 2023 installations were 56GW and this year's will be over 62GW at least, maybe more. 2030 targets have been adjusted already. And electricity storage means curtailment will be less of an issue than anticipated even with higher deployment rates.
But last ~10% of carbon-based electricity will be incredibly difficult to push out. We might hit 85% carbon-free electricity by 2030 but getting even to 95% may take us all the way to 2050, or later. Because of political shit in some countries. In addition to the reasons listed in your article, in some countries electricity grid is under control of unions that see cost of electricity as a form of tax, and they won't let it slip out of their hands.
> In addition to the reasons listed in your article, in some countries electricity grid is under control of unions that see cost of electricity as a form of tax, and they won't let it slip out of their hands.
Can you share which countries? I am genuinely curious.
