Abstract:

Has the renewable transition in the EU-27 advanced evenly across all final energy uses, or has it relied on one channel of decarbonisation more than others? Drawing on harmonised EUROSTAT SHARES statistics for a balanced panel of 27 Member States over 2004-2024 (567 country-year observations per sector), we compare renewable shares in electricity, transport, and heating and cooling at the level of the weighted EU-27 aggregate, the unweighted cross-country distribution, and the sectoral mix within each country, using five dispersion measures to distinguish relative from absolute heterogeneity. All three sectors progressed, but in different ways: electricity led the expansion (15.871% in 2004 to 47.500% in 2024 at the EU-27 aggregate), heating and cooling grew steadily (11.735% to 26.697%), and transport remained the binding constraint (1.432% to 11.204%). Proportional dispersion fell in every sector, yet absolute gaps widened: the frontier-laggard gap grew from 61.627 to 79.410 percentage points (pp) in electricity, from 6.288 to 25.463 pp in transport, and from 44.894 to 59.915 pp in heating and cooling, while the mean within-country gap between the strongest and weakest sector nearly doubled, from 19.753 to 38.898 pp. The EU transition has shared a direction without sharing a sectoral pattern, which matters for how aggregate success in renewable deployment is interpreted.