Recent progress towards all-renewable electricity supplies

Policies to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation will be crucial for negotiations at the UN climate conference (COP21) in Paris. In 2012, we presented data in Nature Materials on the contribution that photovoltaic (PV) power plants installed in Germany, Italy and the UK are making to reducing greenhouse emissions. Here we update our analysis with three more years worth of data, extending our study not only to other countries but also to wind power and bio-electricity generation. This analysis focuses mainly on the technical feasibility of an electricity supply based on all-renewable sources; more detailed cost considerations will be discussed in a forthcoming work.