How are the EU member states contributing to the biomass target for EU’s renewable energy consumption and environmental impact?

Summary

The European Union has increased its ambitious targets by raising the share of EU energy consumption produced from renewable resources from 20% by 2020 to 32% by 2030. For the aim of the analysis carried out in this paper the EU countries are divided into three groups having as main criteria the share that the use of solid biomass used for electricity and heat production had in their Gross Final Energy Consumption over period 2013-2017. Based on this criteria, the leading countries in the EU bioenergy deployment are in addition to Nordic and Baltic countries also Austria, Romania, Croatia and Portugal. Almost all countries of this group have already exceeded their 2020 targets on RES share due to the large progress of biomass in heating/cooling sector. Estonia, Latvia and Portugal are the main leader of industrial wood pellets supply in the EU. Lagging countries are those with a share of solid biomass in the gross final energy consumption below 5.6%, including countries as Spain, Greece, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, Ireland, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta. Notably, this group has in total the lowest distance to 2020 plans on biomass due to the low expectations set in their NREAPs. In between lies the Intermediate group with countries as Italy, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, France, Slovenia, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia. This group has in overall the largest distance from 2020 plans on biomass due to the ambitious plans they set in their NREAPs.