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The share of renewable energy in the gross final energy consumption.

Renewable energy technologies represent a major element in strategies for greening economies everywhere in the world and for tackling the critical global problem of climate change. Several definitions of renewable energy exist; what they have in common is highlighting as renewable all forms of energy that their consumption does not deplete their availability in the future. These include solar, wind, ocean, hydropower, geothermal resources, and bioenergy.

Energy Unit

Energy Unit

Annual

Percentage (%)

This indicator focuses on the amount of renewable energy consumed rather than the capacity for renewable energy production, which cannot always be fully utilized. By focusing on consumption by the end user, it avoids the distortions caused by the fact that conventional energy sources are subject to significant energy losses along the production chain.

Renewable energy consumption includes consumption of energy derived from: hydro, solid biofuels, wind, solar, liquid biofuels, biogas, geothermal, marine and waste. Total final energy consumption is calculated from national balances and statistics as total final consumption minus non-energy use.

Disaggregation of the data on consumption of renewable energy, e.g. by resource and end-use sector, could provide insights into other dimensions of the goal, such as affordability and reliability. For solar energy, it may also be of interest to disaggregate between grid and off-grid capacity.

This indicator is based on the development of comprehensive energy statistics across supply and demand for all energy sources – statistics used to produce a national energy balance. Internationally agreed methodologies for energy statistics are described in the “International Recommendations on Energy Statistics”. Once a national energy balance is developed, the indicator can be calculated by dividing final energy consumption from all renewable sources by total final energy consumption.

This indicator can be used to measure the percentage of final consumption of energy that is derived from renewable resources.

A limitation with existing renewable energy statistics is that they are not able to distinguish whether renewable energy is being sustainably produced. Off-grid renewables data are limited and not sufficiently captured in the energy statistics.

Methodological challenges associated with defining and measuring renewable energy are more fully described the Global Tracking Framework (IEA and World Bank, 2013) Chapter 4, Section 1, page 194-200. Data for traditional use of solid biofuels are generally scarce globally, and developing capacity in tracking such energy use, including developing national level surveys, is essential for sound global energy tracking.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.