Boosting the use of homegrown renewable electricity is Europe’s best way to reduce its vulnerability to volatile international energy supplies and rising energy prices according to a European Environment Agency (EEA) assessment published this week.
Renewables lower energy prices and play key role to reduce vulnerability to fossil fuel supply shocks
Global gas price spikes this year cost the European Union an additional €13 billion by mid-April, while renewables saved €29 billion. This means renewable energy sources are already shielding Europe from price shocks — and could do so far more — acting as a powerful buffer against gas price volatility, as highlighted in the EEA briefing ‘Renewable electricity: best buffer against gas price volatility‘.
Europe’s fossil vulnerability
With around 85% of all gas and 97% of all oil products consumed in the EU in 2024 imported, Europe remains exposed to external supply shocks with direct implications for competitiveness and strategic autonomy. This continued dependence on fossil fuel imports means European consumers are paying a considerable gas volatility premium especially in wake of external political and economic shocks. In the last five years these have included the war in Ukraine and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to the recent the US-Israel-Iran conflict
Renewables: Europe’s future proofing on prices and beyond
Stepping up the deployment of renewables like wind and solar, could lessen Europe’s fossil fuel import dependence and prevent a potential 125% rise in wholesale prices by 2030, according to the briefing which involves assessing price and renewable rollout scenarios. This is based on a 68% growth of renewable energy use of total EU electricity generation, according to projections from EU Member States in the most recent 10-year network development plans.
The EEA briefing cautions, however, that renewables alone will not deliver price gains. As renewable electricity shares rise, price benefits increasingly depend on grids, storage and demand response to integrate variable solar and wind. Faster electrification of buildings, transport and industry must be matched by parallel progress in renewables, grids, storage, efficiency and demand response to avoid locking in additional gas-fired capacity.
Balanced progress across supply, demand, grids and storage — supported by pricing that favours electrification — is essential to deliver sustained price reductions, the briefing says.
These measures are explored at greater detail in the EEA report ‘Renewables, electrification and flexibility – For a competitive EU energy system transformation by 2030’.
External link
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 
The Missing Half of Europe’s Energy Story
The European Environment Agency’s latest report paints an optimistic
picture of Europe’s energy transition. Much of what it says is correct:
wind and solar are now cheap, electrification makes economic sense, and
reducing dependence on imported gas improves both security and
competitiveness. Unfortunately, it also illustrates one of the biggest
weaknesses in current European energy policy. It explains how to build
more renewable generation, but says remarkably little about how to
operate an electricity system once renewables dominate it.
Europe no longer has an energy production problem. Increasingly, it has
an energy management problem. On sunny or windy days there can be too
much electricity. At night, or during calm weather, there may be too
little. Managing this rapidly changing balance, not simply adding more
generation, is becoming the defining engineering challenge.
The report repeatedly calls for “more flexibility”, “more demand
response”, “more storage” and “greater cross-border integration”.
However, they are presented as slogans rather than as engineering
solutions. The report never asks uncomfortable questions.
• How much storage?
• Where should it be located?
• What technologies should provide flexibility?
• How much will it cost?
• At what point does building ever larger transmission networks
become less economical than solving problems locally?
These are now the central questions. Equally striking is the report’s
treatment of electricity markets. It correctly observes that gas often
continues to determine electricity prices even when renewables provide
most of the electricity. It even acknowledges that wholesale prices can
become extremely low while consumers continue paying high bills. Yet it
never seriously questions whether the market itself has become
unsuitable for a system dominated by very low marginal-cost generation.
Instead, the proposed solution is largely “more of the same”: more
market integration, more cross-border trading, more flexibility markets
and more investment incentives i.e more markets, cos markets are the
solution – right? Wrong.
This is rather like recommending better traffic management while
refusing to consider whether the road itself has become too narrow.
There is another omission. The report repeatedly discusses grids. It
says very little about substations.
Most electricity problems occur where electricity is connected,
transformed and consumed. Local batteries, electrolysers, synchronous
condensers, STATCOMs and control systems can often deliver more benefit
per euro than building hundreds of kilometres of new transmission lines.
Finally, there is little discussion of control engineering and how this
is applied to renewable generators, storage and load.
The transition to a renewable-dominated electrical power system is
fundamentally a systems engineering problem involving forecasting,
optimisation and automated control. The report treats flexibility
largely as infrastructure rather than as software controlling
infrastructure. That distinction matters. Europe’s energy transition has
now entered a different phase. The first phase was building renewable
generation. The second phase is operating an electricity system where
renewable generation dominates. The events in Spain in April 2025 show
that EU TSOs (& DNOs) still have a lot of learning in this area.
The EEA report provides a summary of Phase One. It says much less about
Phase Two. That is unfortunate, because Phase Two is where Europe’s
future competitiveness (can the system deliver electricity at a price
that the residential sector and industry can afford) will ultimately be
decided. The EEA report thus failed to engage with the current core
problem: how to operate a power system with a large and growing amount
of renewables. Anybody that thinks “more market” is the answer is either
a parrot or lacks any understanding of the power engineering or system
control.
You make excellent points. Most EEA reports are quite limited and you’ve exposed how it should be more comprehensive. You’ve put a lot of thought into this. Thanks so much.