CO2 reductions in EU-15 for electricity and heat production, 1990-2002

The chart shows the contributions of the various factors that have affected CO2 emissions from electricity and heat production. The top line represents the development of CO2 emissions that would have occurred due to increasing electricity production between 1990 and 2002, if the structure of electricity and heat production had remained unchanged from 1990 (i.e. if the shares of input fuels used to produce electricity and heat had remained constant and the efficiency of electricity and heat production also stayed the same). However, there were a number of changes to the structure of electricity and heat production that tended to reduce CO2 emissions and the contributions of each of these changes to reducing emissions are shown by the shaded areas. The cumulative effect of all these changes was that CO2 emissions from electricity and heat production actually followed the trend shown by the dark black area at the bottom of the graph. Please note that the chart is EU15 only.