Eurostat’s newest numbers show that the European Union still leans on distant suppliers for most of its energy. In 2024, 57.2 % of the energy that the Union used came from outside its borders. The share was 56.9 % in 2004 – the change across twenty years is only 0.3 percentage points. Despite speeches about autonomy and heavy spending on wind, sun and efficiency, the bloc now buys almost exactly the same share abroad as it did when the century began.
This lack of progress is remarkable because the years since 2022 brought severe shocks. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was expected to cut the link to Russian oil and gas. Trade routes shifted but total import dependence stayed high. Russia no longer leads the supplier list. For crude oil, the United States delivers 16 % of EU needs, Norway 12 % and Kazakhstan 9 %.
In the gas sector, Norway is now the undisputed kingpin, accounting for 30% of imports, with the US providing another 17%. Algeria and, perhaps surprisingly given the efforts to shun Moscow, Russia itself, each still supply 14%. The headline is that the EU has simply swapped one form of dependency for another, trading reliance on Russian pipelines for reliance on American LNG and Norwegian hydrocarbons.
The internal dynamics of this dependency vary wildly across the continent, exposing the fault lines in the EU’s much-vaunted energy union. At one extreme lies Estonia, a beacon of energy sovereignty, which imported a mere 5% of its energy in 2024. At the other, you have the basket cases of Malta and Luxembourg, import-dependent to the tune of 98% and 91% respectively, followed by Cyprus at 88%. This is the geography of vulnerability: small, often island, nations with limited indigenous resources and interconnected grids that are essentially at the mercy of larger neighbours and global shipping lanes.
From a British perspective, these figures are not just an abstract curiosity; they are a mirror reflecting our own precarious position and a yardstick against which to measure our progress. The UK formally left the EU’s statistical ambit years ago, but our energy fate remains intertwined with the continent’s. We are, after all, still physically connected by interconnectors that flow electricity back and forth, and we compete for the same cargoes of LNG on the global market. While the Eurostat data confirms the UK was a notable supplier of oil to the EU last year, accounting for 6% of imports, our own domestic story is one of a slow, and some would say insufficient, pivot towards homegrown power. The latest government statistics show that in 2024, renewables generated a record 50.8% of the UK’s electricity, a significant milestone. This surge, driven by a record 84.1 TWh from wind power, is finally starting to loosen the grip of foreign fuels on our power sector.
This is where the contrast with the EU’s broader stagnation becomes instructive. While the bloc as a whole remains hooked on imports, the UK’s electricity mix is undergoing a rapid transformation. Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) highlights that a decade ago, roughly two-thirds of the fuel used to generate British electricity came from abroad. By 2024, that had fallen to just under half. The logic is brutally simple and effective: wind and solar, once built, require no fuel. Every kilowatt-hour they generate is a kilowatt-hour that doesn’t require a shipment of Qatari LNG or a pipeline from Norway. As Dr Simon Cran-McGreehin of the ECIU put it, British electricity is becoming “more British,” and this is the tangible benefit of the net-zero transition in action.
However, it would be dangerously complacent to declare victory. Despite the renewable revolution, the UK’s energy system is still profoundly exposed. The same government data shows that gas remains the single largest source of electricity generation, and it continues to set the price for the entire market the vast majority of the time. This means that when global gas prices spiked in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, British households were hammered just as hard as those in Germany or Italy. The Energy Crisis Commission has rightly warned that the UK remains vulnerable to future price shocks precisely because of this lingering gas dependency. The North Sea’s output is in terminal decline, and new drilling licences will make, in the words of the industry’s own regulator, only a “minor difference” to overall production. The heavy lifting on genuine energy security, therefore, falls squarely on renewables. We are not yet out of the woods; we are merely building the path out while still standing in the thick of it. The ultimate prize is not just a cleaner grid, but one that insulates the country from the geopolitical and market volatility that has caused so much damage in recent years.`
