Energy Transition in Poland in the Context of EU Climate Policy: An Analysis of the Energy–Economy–CO2 Emissions Nexus

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🔬研究者:Empirical approach using OLS and ARDL to disentangle the energy-economy-emissions nexus in a coal-dependent economy.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights the limited short-term impact of renewable energy on emissions, emphasizing the need for coal phase-down strategies.

🏛政策担当者:Supports the design of energy transition policies that prioritize structural changes in the energy mix over mere economic growth.

This paper examines the relationship between macroeconomic scale, the structure of energy consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions in Poland over the period 2000–2023, against the background of the country’s energy transition under European Union (EU) climate policy. The study aims to identify the extent to which gross domestic product (GDP), hard coal consumption, natural gas consumption, and electricity generation from renewable energy sources (RES) explain the level of CO2 emissions in a coal-dependent economy undergoing gradual structural change. The empirical analysis is based on annual data from Statistics Poland and applies two complementary econometric approaches: an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model to capture the baseline relationships and an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to examine short-run dynamics and lagged effects. The OLS results show that the model explains a substantial share of emission variability and that coal consumption is the only statistically significant determinant of CO2 emissions, with a strong positive coefficient. GDP, natural gas consumption, and RES production do not exhibit statistically significant effects in the baseline specification. The ARDL results indicate that coal has the strongest contemporaneous statistical association with emissions, while also suggesting weak autoregressive properties of the emission system and the absence of statistically significant short-run associations for GDP, gas, and renewables. Sensitivity analysis further shows that coal remains the variable most strongly associated with emission levels, whereas the estimated associations for GDP, gas, and RES are comparatively weak. The findings suggest that, in Poland, emission dynamics are more closely linked to the carbon intensity of the energy mix than to the scale of economic activity itself. The study suggests that effective decarbonization is likely to be associated with a structural reduction in coal dependence, while the emission-reduction potential of renewable energy expansion may become more visible over a longer time horizon. These results have important implications for the design of Poland’s energy and climate policy, suggesting that the success of the transition is closely linked to changes in the structure of energy carriers in a way consistent with economic and infrastructural constraints.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/en19102301first seen 2026-05-31 04:33:07 · last seen 2026-06-03 04:44:14