Progress toward the EU’s 2030 Renewable Energy Target: Gap Analysis and Forecast

An important objective of the European Union climate and energy policy is the transition to renewable energy, but the distance to the 2030 target is still considerable and the progress is still uneven across Member States. This paper analyzes the progress of European Union Member States in order to achieve in 2030 the 42.5% renewable energy target proposed by EU. The study is based only on two Eurostat indicators, the share of energy from renewable sources in gross final energy consumption and total energy supply expressed in thousand tonnes of oil equivalent, taking into consideration 2010-2024 period. Combining historical analysis, growth measurement and forecasting, we could estimate the gap in relative and absolute terms. All the calculations and the visualizations were made using Power BI Desktop with Power Querry in order to format the tables, make connections between data, add measures with DAX formulas. The results show that the renewable energy share of the European Union increased from 14.41% in 2010 to 25.24% in 2024, but the projected value for 2029 reaches only 34.47% and 401,160.67 thousand tonnes of oil equivalent, which remains below the 42.5% target, and only 494,613.54 thousand tonnes of oil equivalent which means a gap of 93,452.86 thousand tonnes of oil equivalent. The paper contributes by forecasting the renewable energy in absolute and relative terms being a transparent and reproducible framework, showing that the challenge becomes more visible when renewable energy targets are assessed not only in percentages, but also as physical energy quantities.