Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – As the Trump Department of Energy and the Republican tax bill try to kneecap solar energy in the United States, Europe and China are making impressive strides in this sector, with economic and environmental benefits of which the US seems bent on depriving itself. The Ember energy consultancy just announced that in June, 2025, solar was the single largest generator of electricity in the European Union.
It is the first time solar power beat out all the other power sources in Europe. A bonus: coal shrank to only 6%, even though some European countries, such as Poland, had been heavily dependent on it earlier.
Records for solar power production were set in 13 EU countries. While no one will be surprised to see Greece or France on this list, how many of us would guess that these thirteen include Poland, Estonia and Germany?
22.1% of European electricity was generated by solar installations in June. Solar power generation was up 22% from June 2024.
Europe’s largest such installation is the Witznitz Solar Farm near Leipzig, which now has a capacity of 650 megawatts. It is entirely privately built and run with no government input. It just went into operation continuously at the end of March, 2024, and overtook its nearest competitor, in Spain. It powers over 200,000 households about equal to those in the entire state of Wyoming, and avoids 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
The second biggest solar installation in the EU is at Badajoz, Extremadura, Spain, northwest of Seville. Run by a Spanish subsidiary of the Iberdrola Group, it has an installed capacity of 500 megawatts and will also power more than 200,000 homes — equivalent to all of Wyoming. It has 1.4 million solar panels.
The next nearest source of electricity for the European Union was nuclear at 21.8%. Several nuclear plants had to shut down in France last month because they use older technology that requires cooling by river water, and the rivers got too hot.
The third source was wind at 15.8%. So all the top three generators of electricity were low-carbon. So was the fifth source, hydro, at 12.8%. Its production was off because of droughts that reduced water flow. Fossil gas was fourth at 14.4%.
Photo by Michael Förtsch on Unsplash
It is mindboggling to me how much things have changed in just 10 years. In 2015 coal produced about a quarter of Europe’s electricity and renewables taken all together were about a fourth.
Ember does a good job, but one essential thing they left out of this analysis was that Europe now has 61.1 GWh in installed battery capacity up by about a third over just last year. Mega-batteries help smooth out the grid to avoid brownouts and store daytime solar energy for use twilight or night. Moreover, battery capacity is being added hand over fist in Europe, so that by 2029 the 27 nations of the European Union will have 334 GWh in battery capacity. That capacity will turbocharge wind and solar, since they won’t actually be intermittent anymore.