Wood and Similar Solid Fuels Are Still the EU's Largest Renewable Source

What the renewable total is made of

Each Member State reports how much renewable energy it counts toward the EU's renewable energy target, and Eurostat splits that amount by the source that produced it: wind, sunlight, rivers, heat drawn from the air and the ground, and fuels made from plants and waste. This study reads that split. Its percentages are shares of the renewable total, so they describe what a country's renewable energy consists of rather than how much of its energy is renewable.

Quantities are expressed in tonnes of oil equivalent, a common yardstick that converts electricity, heat and fuel into the energy released by burning that weight of crude oil.

Solid biomass comes first

In 2024 solid biomass supplied 34.3% of the renewable energy counted across the EU. The category gathers solid fuels of plant and animal origin: fuelwood, wood chips, pellets and other wood residues, black liquor from pulp mills, bagasse left over from sugar cane, animal waste, other plant material and the renewable part of industrial waste.

Wind followed at 17.8%, hydropower at 12.4% and solar photovoltaics, the panels that turn sunlight into electricity, at 10.8%. Heat pumps, which take heat from the air, the ground or water, contributed 8.0%, and biofuels such as biodiesel and bioethanol 7.4%. Biogases, the gas given off as manure, sewage sludge and other organic matter ferments, supplied 4.0%; renewable municipal waste, the biodegradable part of the rubbish that incinerators burn for energy, 2.3%; and solar thermal collectors 1.3%. Geothermal energy, renewable cooling, bioliquids (liquid fuels from biomass burned for heat and power rather than in vehicles), charcoal and the energy of tides and waves make up the rest, each below 0.7%.

Set against one another, those published shares put solid biomass at almost twice the size of wind, and above wind and hydropower taken together. Added before rounding, the two come to 30.1%, a sum computed here.

Where biomass leads

Solid biomass is the largest renewable source in 20 of the 27 Member States. In nine of them it supplies more than half of the renewable total: Latvia at 75.8%, Estonia at 70.8%, Finland at 60.8%, Lithuania at 60.0%, Czechia at 59.8%, Slovakia at 54.0%, Croatia at 52.9%, and Hungary and Poland at 51.8% each.

That group is geographically compact. It is the three Baltic states and Finland, and a band of central European countries running from Poland down to Croatia.

Biomass also comes first in Austria at 41.5%, Slovenia at 39.7% and Sweden at 39.6%, but in all three it shares the load with rivers. Hydropower supplies 32.6% of Austrian renewable energy, 32.7% of Slovenian, the highest hydro share in the Union, and 26.2% of Swedish.

Where wind, sunlight or cooling come first

Seven Member States put another source at the top. In five it is wind. Ireland draws 53.4% of its renewable energy from wind, which makes it the only Member State where any source other than biomass passes half. The Netherlands follows at 32.1%, Germany at 27.4%, Spain at 26.3% and Greece at 23.8%.

Cyprus leads with solar photovoltaics at 25.1%, with solar thermal collectors close behind at 20.9%. Malta is the most unusual case: its leading source is renewable cooling, the category that counts renewable energy used to cool buildings and processes, at 42.2% of its renewable total.

These are also the countries where biomass counts least. Ireland takes 9.9% of its renewable energy from solid biomass, Cyprus 4.6% and Malta 0.7%, the only three Member States below 10%.

Solar photovoltaics draws almost the reverse map. Its share is highest in Cyprus at 25.1%, Hungary at 24.8% and Malta at 23.0%, and lowest in Latvia at 2.5%, Sweden at 1.6% and Finland at 0.6%. Hungary is the exception to that pattern. It is the only Member State where solid biomass supplies more than half of renewable energy and solar photovoltaics more than a fifth, at 51.8% and 24.8%.

What changed between 2021 and 2024

The dataset begins in 2021. Over the three years to 2024 the EU's renewable total rose from 222.4 to 242.6 million tonnes of oil equivalent, an increase of 20.1 million or 9.1%. Solid biomass moved the other way, from 90.3 to 83.2 million, a fall of 7.1 million or 7.9%. These changes are computed by Silver Data Lab from the published quantities in thousand tonnes, before rounding.

Three sources carried the growth. Solar photovoltaics rose from 13.7 to 26.1 million tonnes, up 90.9%, so it nearly doubled. Wind rose by 23.2% to 43.1 million and heat pumps by 32.1% to 19.5 million. Together they added 25.3 million tonnes, more than the increase in the total, which is arithmetically possible only because biomass was shrinking at the same time. Hydropower was almost flat, up 0.4%.

Six sources each supply more than 7% of the EU's renewable energy, and solid biomass is the only one of them whose quantity fell. Its share fell faster than its quantity, from 40.6% to 34.3%, because the total around it was growing.

The same movement shows up country by country. The biomass share of renewable energy fell in 25 of the 27 Member States, held at 9.9% in Ireland and rose only in Luxembourg, from 35.8% to 41.9%. The steepest falls in share were in Poland, from 68.1% to 51.8%, Hungary, from 66.2% to 51.8%, and Lithuania, from 73.8% to 60.0%. In Lithuania the quantity of biomass in fact edged up; its share dropped because the country's renewable total grew much faster. Measured as a quantity, solid biomass fell in 18 Member States.

Three Member States changed their leading source along the way. In Germany biomass came first in 2021 and 2022, and wind in 2023 and 2024. In Cyprus solar thermal collectors led until 2023 and photovoltaics overtook them in 2024, while Malta's lead passed from photovoltaics in 2021 to renewable cooling from 2022 onwards.

What the mix does not show

A large biomass share says nothing on its own about how much renewable energy a country uses. The companion study on this site ranks Member States by the renewable share of their whole energy consumption; this one asks what that renewable energy is. A country can lean heavily on biomass with a large renewable share or a small one, and the percentages here cannot tell the two apart.

Nor do they record causes. A mild winter that lowers the demand for heating, a pulp mill that closes and a subsidy for rooftop panels would all register the same way in these figures, and the dataset does not separate one from another.