For the first time in the history of the Romanian energy sector, coal has dropped out of the top three primary energy sources due to the rise in renewable energy sources in 2020, according to the latest report released by the Romanian Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE), reports Hungarian news outlet Maszol.
The top three primary energy sources of the country’s total energy production were:
The total energy production capacity of the Romanian energy sector is 19,500 MW.
As you may already know, the European Union is aiming to be climate-neutral by 2050, which means net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. When the Green Deal was officially announced, it was recognized as an urgent challenge. The EU Commission’s vision is in line with the Paris Agreement objective to keep the global temperature increase well below 2°C and pursue efforts to keep it to 1.5°C.
Romania has no radical goals such as eliminating fossil fuels like coal from the energy sector. However, coal has been slowly losing ground to other energy production sources. Last year, it accounted for 16.55 percent of Romania’s total energy production.
Meanwhile, renewable energy has been on the rise, accounting for 15.38 percent of the total energy production last year. In 2020, wind power was the number one renewable, accounting for 13.63 percent; solar energy, 1.52 percent; and biomass, only 0.23 percent, the ANRE dataset reveals.
Wind turbines in Romania have a total capacity of 3,000 MW, but there is an ongoing investment that will increase this capacity to 5,250 MW by 2030. A bigger development is taking place in the solar energy sector, which is looking to increase its production capacity to 5,000 MW by 2030.
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