{"id":112502,"date":"2025-10-10T03:06:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T03:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/112502\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T03:06:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T03:06:10","slug":"iea-renewables-have-cut-fossil-fuel-imports-for-more-than-100-countries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/112502\/","title":{"rendered":"IEA: Renewables have cut fossil-fuel imports for more than 100 countries"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 100 countries have cut their dependence on fossil-fuel imports and saved hundreds of billions of dollars by continuing to invest in renewables, according to the International Energy Agency<\/a> (IEA).<\/p>\n

It says<\/a> nations such as the UK, Germany and Chile have reduced their need for imported coal and gas by around a third since 2010, mainly by building wind and solar power.<\/p>\n

Denmark has cut its reliance on fossil-fuel imports by nearly half over the same period.<\/p>\n

Renewable expansion allowed these nations to collectively avoid importing 700m tonnes of coal and 400bn cubic metres of gas in 2023, equivalent to around 10% of global consumption.<\/p>\n

In doing so, the fuel-importing countries saved more than $1.3tn between 2010 and 2023 that would otherwise have been spent on fossil fuels from overseas.<\/p>\n

Reduced reliance<\/p>\n

The IEA\u2019s Renewables 2025<\/a> report quantifies the benefits of renewable-energy deployment for electricity systems in fossil fuel-importing nations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It compares recent trends in renewable expansion to an alternative \u201clow renewable-energy source\u201d scenario, in which this growth did not take place.<\/p>\n

In this counterfactual, fuel-importing countries stopped building wind, solar and other non-hydropower renewable-energy projects after 2010.<\/p>\n

In reality, the world added around 2,500 gigawatts (GW) of such projects between 2010 and 2023, according to the IEA, more than the combined electricity generating capacity<\/a> of the EU and US in 2023, from all sources. Roughly 80% of this new renewable capacity was built in nations that rely on coal and gas imports to generate electricity.<\/p>\n

The chart below shows how 31 of these countries have substantially cut their dependence on imported fossil fuels over the 13-year period, as a result of expanding their wind, solar and other renewable energy supplies. All of these countries are net importers of coal and gas.<\/p>\n

\"ChartShare of national electricity supplies that depend on imported fossil fuels in 2023, actual (left) and in the IEA\u2019s \u201clow renewable-energy source\u201d scenario (right), in 31 countries that are net importers of coal and gas. Source: IEA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In total, the IEA identified 107 countries that had reduced their dependence on fossil fuel imports for electricity generation, to some extent due to the deployment of renewables other than hydropower.<\/p>\n

Of these, 38 had cut their reliance on electricity from imported coal and gas by more than 10 percentage points and eight had seen that share drop by more than 30 percentage points.<\/p>\n

Security and resilience<\/p>\n

The IEA stresses that renewables \u201cinherently strengthen energy supply security\u201d, because they generate electricity domestically, while also \u201cimproving\u2026economic resilience\u201d in fossil-fuel importer countries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is particularly true for countries with low or dwindling<\/a> domestic energy resources.<\/p>\n

The agency cites the energy crisis<\/a> exacerbated by Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, which exposed EU importers to spiralling fossil-fuel prices.<\/p>\n

Bulgaria, Romania and Finland \u2013 which have historically depended on Russian gas for electricity generation \u2013 have all brought their import reliance close to zero in recent years by building renewables.<\/p>\n

In the UK, where there has been mounting opposition<\/a> to renewables from right-wing political parties, the IEA says reliance on electricity generated with imported fossil fuels has dropped from 45% to under 25% in a decade, thanks primarily to the growth of wind and solar power.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Without these technologies, the UK<\/a> would now be needing to import fossil fuels to supply nearly 60% of its electricity, the IEA says.<\/p>\n

Other major economies, notably China<\/a> and the EU, would also have had to rely on a growing share of coal and gas from overseas, if they had not expanded renewables.<\/p>\n

As well as increasing the need for fossil-fuel imports from other countries, switching renewables for fossil fuels would require significantly higher energy usage \u201cdue to [fossil fuels\u2019] lower conversion efficiencies\u201d, the IEA notes. Each gigawatt-hour (GWh) of renewable power produced has avoided the need for 2-3GWh of fossil fuels, it explains.<\/p>\n

Finally, the IEA points out that spending on renewables rather than imported fossil fuels keeps more investment in domestic economies and supports local jobs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 100 countries have cut their dependence on fossil-fuel imports and saved hundreds of billions of dollars…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[269],"tags":[8048,10982,18,7520,440,20441,19,35794,17,961,23494,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-112502","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-clean-energy","9":"tag-coal","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-energy","12":"tag-environment","13":"tag-fossil-fuels","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-international-energy-agency","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-renewable-energy","18":"tag-renewables","19":"tag-science"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}