Paris (AFP)
The production of renewable energies progressed in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, resisting better than that linked to nuclear power, which fell in the face of a drop in demand, underlines a report released on Thursday.
In the 1st quarter of 2020, "the deployment and production of renewable energies resisted the effects of the pandemic better (...) than the nuclear energy sector", noted the 2020 edition of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report , an annual report devoted to the subject.
During this period, the production of renewable energies grew by around 3%, while their relative share in world production increased by 1.5 percentage points.
According to the authors, this increase is mainly due to a "double-digit increase in the percentage of wind power and a jump in solar photovoltaic (PV) energy production from projects installed during the previous year. ".
Nuclear production, on the other hand, fell "by about 3%" over the period, in response to lower demand and because fewer reactors were operational in some regions.
Covid-19 "is the first pandemic of this magnitude" in the history of nuclear energy, the document said.
In 2019, the share of electricity production from renewable energies (excluding hydroelectricity) in the energy mix for the first time even exceeded that of nuclear energy (10.39% against 10.35% ).
The medium-term impact of the pandemic on the energy mix is however "far from clear", according to the report.
Also in 2019, annual nuclear electricity production increased.
It reached 2,657 net terawatt-hours (TWh), an increase of 3.7% compared to 2018 "and only 3 TWh less than the historical peak of 2006", we can read in the report.
Half of this increase is linked to an increase of more than 19% in Chinese nuclear production.
© 2020 AFP