EU Member States are obliged to submit National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAPs) to the European Commission, outlining how they expect to meet their 2020 renewable energy target, including the technology mix they intend to use and the trajectory they will follow.

The Energy research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN) has extracted key data from the published National Action Plans and has made these available for further analysis and comparison in a database. The main information is also presented in graphs and tables in a data report. This new publication is online available through 'Renewable Energy Projections as Published in the National Renewable Energy Action Plans of the European Member States' and it integrates and aggregates, where possible, the renewable energy projection data from the individual European countries, presents tables in various cross-sections and offers graphical representations of  the data. Moreover, derived indicators (average annual growth, full load hours for electricity options, per capita and per area indicators) are presented. This work has been financed by the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Latest version
To date the third version of the work is online available. The first version (September 2010) covered 19 Member States, the second version (October 2010) covered 21 Member States and the current version (13 December 2010) presents the projections for 26 Member States. The respective countries available are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. At the time of writing this article, Hungaria is the only EU Member State that did not yet release its NREAP.
The NREAP documents (including Action Plans) are all published on the Transparency Platform on Renewable Energy, a platform established by the European Commission. 

Database and image files
A database containing energy consumption and renewable projections up to 2020 for the 26 countries is available for download in CSV format. Moreover, all figures from the report are available for download as separate image files (png and pdf). 

Next steps: January 2011 and future activities
The only European Union Member State for which the NREAP is not available yet is Hungary. Once this Action Plan has been released as well, the data will be incorporated into both the database and the data report. However, when or whether this release will be available is not known. ECN envisages to extend the report with a set of new cross-sections of the database. The information is all available already in the CSV database, but for the reader’s convenience other parameters such as gross final energy consumption in all Member States deserve separate presentation in the data report. As the current version of the report comprises over 200 pages already, it is planned to come with an Executive Summary of the document in January 2011.

Wind power capacity in gigawatt (GW) for 26 European Member States for the years 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 (Illustration ECN, click to enlarge).

Additional activities
ECN is currently inviting interested organisations and companies to fund additional activities that allow further analysis of the NREAP data. For more information, email Luuk Beurskens.

This ECN Newsletter article may be published without permission provided reference is made to the source: www.ecn.nl/nl/nieuws/newsletter-en/