Current situation of Carbon Emission in Europe

The CO₂ emitted during electricity generation is very different according to fuel type, with production from fossil fuel clearly producing most.  This page describes the current situation of carbon emissions in European Countries.

This page will show that countries with large generation fractions of nuclear + hydro electricity have the lowest CO₂ emission while countries with large generations fractions of wind + solar do not because of the need to have large amounts of fossil fuel generation to compensate for periods when the wind and solar generation is low due to weather conditions.

The evaluation of CO₂ emission values for each generation type are based on the IPCC 2014 data as presented here: Carbon Intensity.

The plot clearly shows that countries with high generation mix fractions of hydro+nuclear have very low carbon emission while those with high wind+solar fraction, but low hydro+nuclear have much higher emissions.

Carbon intensity for 27 countries in Europe versus the % of hydro+nuclear in the generation mix. For each country the fraction of wind+solar is indicated by the size of the bubble with the scale as in the legend.

The following three plots summarise the emissions of the 27 European countries considered in different ways.

For the 27 countries, the carbon intensities average over year 2021 in terms of grams of CO2 equivalent emissions per KWh of electricity generated.

For the 27 countries, the CO₂ emission displaced in units of Kg CO₂ / day and per capita plotted against the population of the country such that the area of the rectangle for each count give the total CO2 emissions.

Total CO2 emission for 2021 for the 27 countries.

Generation mix for four countries: France, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway having large fractions of hydro+nuclear and consequently low carbon intensity.

Generation mix for four countries: Germany, United Kingdom, Greece and Denmark having large fractions of wind+solar and consequently has fossil fuel fractions and relatively high carbon intensity.