Trading the weight of fossil fuels for the power of the sun
Last week, Ember’s European Electricity Review confirmed a historic shift: for the first time, wind and solar generated more electricity across the EU than fossil fuels. In Central and Eastern Europe, that milestone has not arrived everywhere, but the underlying shift is unmistakable. In 2025, Hungary generated more electricity from solar power than the entire region did ten years earlier – a measure of how quickly the old energy order is being dismantled.
Energy security in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia traditionally meant two things: coal at home and gas from abroad. By 2025, that equation has been rewritten. Solar generation across the region has surged more than tenfold since 2015. Coal-fired power output has fallen by nearly half. What once seemed like opposing goals – decarbonisation and energy autonomy – now increasingly describe the same project.
Records across regions
Although progress across the region has been uneven, the direction is clear. Over the past five years, solar generation has more than tripled across the majority of Central and Eastern European countries, with Czechia and Slovakia as notable exceptions, and Romania still recording a strong 2.8-fold increase. Within the Visegrad countries, Hungary stands out not just for scale but for speed. In 2025, solar supplied 27.75 per cent of its electricity – the highest share in the entire European Union – up from just 7 per cent in 2020. As solar climbed, coal and gas retreated.
Poland’s transformation has been just as dramatic, if less complete. Solar rose from barely 1 per cent of electricity output in 2020 to over 11 per cent by 2025 while coal fell to an all-time low. In the same year, Poland connected its first offshore wind turbine in the Baltic Sea, adding a new large-scale source to its electricity mix.
If the Visegrad countries illustrate how renewables can erode fossil dominance from within existing systems, the Baltic states show how energy transitions can redraw the system itself. In 2025, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania completed their long-planned disconnection from the Russian and Belarusian electricity grid, synchronising instead with continental Europe. This was not only a geopolitical break, but a technical and strategic one, made possible by years of strategic investment.
That shift is already visible in how the Baltic power systems operate. In both Estonia and Lithuania, wind and solar together supplied more than half of electricity generation for at least one third of all hours in 2025. Lithuania’s transformation has been particularly rapid, with wind power alone rising from 19 per cent of generation in 2020 to 44 per cent in 2025, underscoring how renewable expansion and grid sovereignty have advanced in tandem.
In the EU Balkans, the pace of change has been no less striking. Bulgaria recorded a large single-year shift in 2025, with solar’s share of electricity generation jumping by nearly four percentage points, from 14.3 per cent to 18.1 per cent. Croatia crossed a different threshold: wind and solar together generated more electricity than all fossil sources combined for the first time, placing the country among a group of EU countries where renewables have moved from the margins to the centre of the power systems.
Flexibility supports the next phase of solar growth
As solar capacity has scaled up across Europe, its integration is in need of a stronger focus. Ensuring that this new generation strengthens energy security and delivers lower costs now depends on flexibility. Batteries and demand-side solutions are therefore becoming a core element of power system planning.
Poland shows how quickly this shift is taking shape. The country has one of the largest grid-scale battery pipelines in the EU, totalling 7.3 gigawatts (GW), including 0.8 GW already permitted or under construction. This pipeline has been supported by batteries’ strong performance in the 2023 and 2024 capacity market auctions, which created predictable revenue streams, and was further reinforced in 2025 through a dedicated storage support scheme providing grants and loans of up to 1.2 billion euros.
When battery capacity is measured relative to installed wind and solar power, Bulgaria and Romania rank second and third in the EU, and both countries are expected to continue expanding storage capacity.
Battery deployment in Central Europe is also underpinned by a strong industrial base. In 2021, Hungary accounted for around one-fifth of the EU’s battery manufacturing value added and, as of January 2025, hosted nearly 40 per cent of the bloc’s cell assembly capacity. Poland ranks among the world’s top three battery exporters and has one of Europe’s largest gigafactory pipelines. Continued solar expansion plays a critical role in supporting this ecosystem by providing the low-cost electricity required by battery manufacturing and reinforcing the region’s position in Europe’s clean-tech value chain.
Alongside storage, demand flexibility is beginning to play a more visible role in integrating solar energy and lowering system costs. In Poland, demand response from large electricity consumers has been used by the grid operator since 2017, with up to 1 GW contracted directly and through capacity market auctions since 2021.
In Czechia, high uptake of behind-the-meter solutions is creating new flexibility opportunities. More than 90 per cent of new residential solar systems are installed with a battery and a smart meter, among the highest attachment rates in Europe. Since April 2025, the transmission system operator has been procuring demand flexibility from households, enabling roughly 400 home batteries to reliably support grid balancing. During a local blackout in July 2025, participating households collectively absorbed 6 megawatt-hours (MWh) of surplus generation, contributing to the restoration of grid stability.
Progress uneven, momentum undeniable
The acceleration of renewables across Central and Eastern Europe has been shaped by overlapping shocks: an energy crisis, heightened security concerns, shifting economic incentives. These forced long-standing assumptions to be tested in real time.
By 2025, wind and solar had become central to electricity generation across much of the EU, producing more power than all fossil sources combined in 14 of the 27 member states. From Central and Eastern Europe, only Lithuania, Hungary and Croatia had crossed that threshold, underlining that the region’s transformation remains incomplete.
In some of these countries, politics continues to work against renewable energy development rather than support it. Yet the direction of change is difficult to dismiss. Where renewable capacity has expanded, it has delivered tangible benefits, including lower exposure to imported fuels. The past decade has not resolved Central and Eastern Europe’s energy transition, but it has made one point increasingly clear: renewable energy is no longer an exception in the region’s power systems, but an established and growing force.
Sources: Ember’s European Electricity Review 2026 and Turning to the Sun: The Solar Rise in Central Europe.