Further Growth in Renewable Energy Production

The Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority (HEA) has published its report summarizing the preliminary energy statistics of last year. According to the report, Hungary continues to rely heavily on imports, but solar power generation has increased significantly.

As the report points out, a significant part of Hungary's primary domestic energy use was provided by imports of oil and oil derivatives and natural gas. The net imports of these two energy carriers together amounted to 551 petajoules (PJ).

The most interesting part of the report is about electricity generation: in 2020, gross electricity generated from renewable energy sources increased by 17.7% and heat generated from renewable energy sources increased by 3.7% compared to 2019. The share of electricity generated from renewable energy sources in gross final electricity consumption increased to 11.9%.

Hungary remains a country with a relatively high import exposure, but the import dependency ratio for all energy carriers decreased by 13 percentage points to 56.3% in 2020. In the case of natural gas, there was a significant stock replenishment in 2019 for security of supply reasons, so the import dependency ratio for 2019 was particularly high. In 2020, however, import dependency on natural gas decreased significantly by 39.5 percentage points.

Primary domestic consumption in 2020 was 1,099 PJ according to preliminary data and decreased by 1.5% compared to the previous year. Due to the pandemic, the amount of kerosene used in international aviation in 2020 decreased significantly by 63.5% compared to the previous year according to preliminary data. Domestic sales of the main road fuels also fell, with motor gasoline down by 10.2% and diesel for transport down by 6.7% compared to 2019.

In 2020, gross electricity production amounted to 34 924 GWh, up 2.3% on the previous year. Compared to the previous year, the electricity generated by solar panels increased strongly, exceeding the 2019 volume by 63.7%. At the end of 2020, the capacity of solar panels connected to the grid amounted to more than 2,000 MW, i.e. exceeding the installed capacity of the Paks nuclear power plant.