Technical assistance in realisation of the 5th report on progress of renewable energy in the EU : task 1-2 : final report

At an EU-level, the shares of renewable energy sources (RES) in total, electricity (RES-E), heating and cooling (RES-H&C), and to a lesser extent also transport (RES-T) have been continuously increasing over the past years. In 2018, the EU reached a share of 18% of RES in gross final energy consumption, the target for 2020 being 20% as defined in the RES Directive 2009/28/EC (RED). Up to 2018, the EU-28 has been comfortably above the indicative trajectory set in the RED, defined as the average values of 2011/2012, 2013/2014, 2015/2016 and 2017/2018, respectively. However, the EU as a whole is slightly below the more ambitious trajectory defined by the Member States (MS) themselves in their NREAPs. With regard to individual sectors, the RES-E and the RES-H&C sectors are well on track, resulting from the especially high contributions on the "higher than planned" generation of RES-E from photovoltaics and use of heat pumps in the RES-H&C sector. Meanwhile, the RES-T sector stays below the planned share (8.03% actual versus 8.50% planned) resulting from the "lower than planned" RES consumption for all energy sources. 23 MS are above their indicative RED trajectory for 2017/2018. Only Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovenia are below their indicative RED trajectories. The largest positive deviations from their indicative RED trajectories can be observed in Croatia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Italy.