Europe leaps towards energy autonomy as sanctions undercut Russia

Before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia was Europe’s chief energy source. It supplied 29 percent of the European Union’s oil imports and 43 percent of its gas imports. Moscow was on the cusp of activating the twin Nordstream 2 pipelines, which would have increased its gas exports to the EU by a third.

This energy relationship came crashing down in February last year, as Russian troops entered Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Germany, which had nurtured the Nordstream 2 pipelines for 15 years against United States objections, said it was halting the process of certifying them for commercial use.

After Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Dutch oil major Shell said it was withdrawing from joint projects worth $3bn with Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, crippling Gazprom’s ability to develop its fields.

United Kingdom oil major BP said it would extricate itself from a $14bn stake in Rosneft, Russia’s state oil giant.

Since then, the EU has sought to de-fund Russia’s war by sanctioning its coal and oil imports, while Russia has sought to weaken the EU and NATO unity by cutting off flows of natural gas.

But the energy levers that Russian President Vladimir Putin would use to mute Europe’s response to his invasion were instead broken.

“When Russia attacked Ukraine, one working hypothesis was that Europe… would be divided by energy blackmail,” Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias told reporters on the anniversary of the Donbas invasion.

“This hypothesis was completely inaccurate. The EU gained a new unifying narrative and the support to Ukraine is steady, lasting and increasing,” Dendias said.

According to Sir Michael Leigh – the former director-general for enlargement at the European Commission, who now directs the European Public Policy programme at Johns Hopkins University – on the European Union side, there is now a “real determination to reduce drastically dependence” on Russian oil and gas.

“We’ve had a major dose of realism coming into German and European energy policy, and this has put the foot down on the accelerator in energy transition,” Leigh told Al Jazeera.

That transition has lurched forward through recent crises. In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic recession, the EU raised 270 billion euros ($287bn) to fund renewable energy.

After Russia’s invasion, it stiffened its ambition, setting a goal to generate 45 percent of total final energy consumption from renewables. Several EU governments set even more ambitious goals.

Recent analysis by Ember, an energy think-tank, suggests Europeans have moved even faster than their governments.

Ember estimates that electricity from solar photovoltaics and wind reached a record 22 percent of the mix in the EU last year, a one-fifth increase on 2021, with two-thirds of the increase in solar energy coming from rooftop photovoltaics, not power plants.

“The energy transition in Europe is not from the top down – what we’re seeing is it’s bottom up,” Dave Jones, head of electricity insights at Ember, told Al Jazeera. “Individuals are interested in producing their own energy and doing their bit for the energy crisis to defy Russia as an aggressor and a threat to Europe,” he said.

“If people want to step up they can act outside of policy,” said Jones, who believes solar and wind will leap ahead by another fifth this year, and possibly outperform EU 2030 targets.

Renewable energy has obvious attractions for Europe, which is poor in hydrocarbons. Apart from being clean, it on-shores energy production at near-constant prices.