The Hard Part

Essay · society · September 2026

Portugal has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by two-fifths since 2005, and most of the cut came from one change: electricity from wind, water and sun instead of coal. That change is almost complete. What remains is cars and lorries, cattle and landfills, cement and old houses, where emissions have hardly moved, the price of carbon has been softened, and a much faster fall has never been achieved anywhere.

Reading time ≈ 14 min Power → transport → price → pace

The question

The Three Goals concluded that whether an economy can do less harm to the environment depends mainly on how it makes and uses energy, and hardly at all on how many hours people work. In its scenario, if emissions per unit of output keep falling as they have since 2008, Portugal’s emissions per person fall by about half by 2050; a cut of 90 per cent would need them to fall three times as fast. This essay tests that: where the emissions come from, what has cut them, how fast they could fall, and who pays.

−40%Portugal’s greenhouse gas emissions, 2005 to 2024

61%of that fall came from power stations and refineries

−9%change in transport emissions, now the largest source, over the same years

22%of emissions covered by the EU carbon market in 2024, down from 42% in 2005

The sources

Where the emissions come from

Portugal emitted 51.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2024, measured in CO₂ equivalent and leaving out forests and land. That is 40 per cent less than in 2005, when emissions were near their peak, and 13 per cent less than in 1990. Per person it is 4.8 tonnes, well below the EU average of 6.7.[1]

The fall was uneven (Figure 1). Power stations and refineries went from 25.5 million tonnes to 4.3, and account for 61 per cent of the whole cut. Fuel burned in industry and in buildings fell by about two-fifths. Transport fell by only 9 per cent, is now the largest source, at 35 per cent of the total, and has risen since 2014; it is still two-thirds above its 1990 level. Agriculture has not changed since 2005, and waste has fallen by a sixth. Transport, farming and waste together are 59 per cent of what is left.[1]

Fig. 1 — Portugal: greenhouse gas emissions by sector, 2005 and 2024, million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, excluding land use and forests. “Buildings and farm fuel” is fuel burned in homes, services, farms and fishing; “industrial processes” includes cement and fluorinated gases; “fugitive” is leakage from fuels. Data: Eurostat (env_air_gge), inventory submitted in 2026.

Forests and land do not help much either. In most years they absorb a little carbon, but the great fires release it: in 2017 the land sector added 15.8 million tonnes, almost a quarter on top of everything else, and it has been close to neutral or a net source in four of the nine years since 2016. The Climate Law counts on forests absorbing 13 million tonnes a year by 2045–2050; the government’s own plan projects 6.5 million in 2030.[1][2]

What worked

The switch in electricity

The cut in electricity is the success story (Figure 2). Portugal’s two coal power stations closed in 2021: Sines in January and Pego in November. The International Energy Agency attributed the closure of Sines to the phasing out, from 2018, of the exemptions that had spared coal from fuel and carbon taxes, and to “market factors”, among them the price of emission allowances in the EU carbon market, which went from about €6 a tonne in 2017 to €25 in 2019.[3][4] Solar capacity grew sixfold between 2020 and 2025; wind has been nearly flat for a decade. Emissions from electricity fell by 14 per cent a year between 2015 and 2024, faster than in Britain’s celebrated exit from coal.[5]

Fig. 2 — Portugal: electricity generation by source and net imports, terawatt-hours a year, 2000–2025. Hydro output depends on rainfall: 2005, 2012, 2017 and 2022 were dry years. Data: Ember, yearly electricity data.

How renewable Portuguese electricity is depends on how it is measured. Under the EU’s rules, which smooth out wet and dry years, it was 66 per cent in 2024, against 48 per cent in the EU. As a share of electricity generated in Portugal, it was 85 per cent in 2024 and 81 per cent in 2025. As a share of consumption it was about 70 per cent, because 17 to 18 per cent of the electricity used in Portugal in those years was imported, net, from Spain.[5][6] The swings in rainfall are large: hydro produced 4.7 terawatt-hours in the drought of 2005 and more than three times as much in 2010 and 2025, and in dry years gas, coal while it lasted, and imports filled the gap.

Two stories often told about this success need correcting. The first is the price of solar power. Portugal’s solar auctions of 2019 and 2020 set world records, €14.76 and then €11.14 per megawatt-hour, but each record applied to a single small lot: 150 megawatts in 2019 and 10 in 2020.[7] The government has since extended the deadlines for building the auctioned projects several times, citing shortages of materials, inflation and licensing delays, the last time in May 2025 in an order that called it “a last extension, which cannot be extended again”.[8]

The second is the blackout of 28 April 2025, which cut power to the whole of Spain and Portugal, for about twelve hours in Portugal. It was widely blamed on too much solar power. The European grid operators’ expert panel found instead that it began in Spain with “an uncontrolled, rapid rise in system voltage and loss of voltage control”, and that “even with significantly higher inertia values”, the spinning mass of conventional plants, it would not have been avoided. Among the causes it listed were conventional plants that did not provide the voltage support required of them and rules under which wind and solar plants did not regulate voltage at all; the Spanish government’s inquiry noted that they had the technology to do so, but the rules neither required it nor allowed it.[9][10] The reports also say that a grid dominated by inverter-based plants is harder to operate, and one of the oscillations that day was linked to one. The lesson is about how the grid is run and regulated, not that renewables cannot supply it.

Clean electricity has also been cheap for users. Portuguese industry paid about a quarter less than the EU average for electricity in the second half of 2025, before recoverable taxes, roughly the same as in Spain and France. Households paid 16 per cent less in euros, though about the same once prices are adjusted for Portuguese incomes.[11] The costs of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries have fallen by about 10 per cent a year for decades as more are built, far faster than forecasters expected.[12]

The pace

How fast can the rest fall?

The Climate Law requires emissions at least 55 per cent below 2005 by 2030 and 90 per cent below by 2050, with climate neutrality by 2050; the government has said it will aim for 2045.[2][13] From 2024, the 2030 target needs emissions to fall by 4.7 per cent a year, against 2.0 per cent a year over the past decade. The 2050 target needs 6.7 per cent a year for twenty-six years. The Three Goals asked for more, a 90 per cent cut per person from today’s level with the economy still growing, which needs 8.8 per cent a year.[1]

No sector of the Portuguese economy except electricity has ever fallen that fast for a decade (Figure 3). Buildings managed 4.8 per cent a year from 2004 to 2014, industry about 3.5 per cent, transport 2.4 per cent during and after the debt crisis, and agriculture 1.2 per cent. Abroad the record is better than the old rule of thumb, from the Stern Review of 2006, that cuts faster than about 1 per cent a year happen only in recessions.[14] Several countries have cut their carbon dioxide emissions by 4 to 5 per cent a year for a decade while their economies grew: Denmark by 5.4 per cent a year in 2010–2020, Britain by 4.4 per cent, Sweden by 4.2 per cent in the 1980s. None of them sustained 6.7 per cent, let alone 8.8.[15]

Fig. 3 — Portugal: the fastest average fall in greenhouse gas emissions over any ten-year window since 1990, by sector, per cent a year, against the pace every sector would need from 2024 for a 90 per cent cut per person by 2050 with 1 per cent annual growth (−8.8) and for the Climate Law’s 90 per cent cut against 2005 (−6.7). Data: Eurostat (env_air_gge); author’s calculation.

The arithmetic of the remainder is stark. Agriculture and waste alone emitted 12.5 million tonnes in 2024, most of it methane from cattle and landfills. A 90 per cent cut per person would leave about 5 million tonnes for the whole economy in 2050, and the Climate Law’s target about 8.6 million. Either both sectors fall much faster than they ever have, or the law must count on the forests, which have not yet delivered a reliable sink.[1]

The price

A carbon price that shrank

The EU carbon market, which made coal unprofitable, covers power stations and heavy industry. Having done its work, it now covers little of what is left: installations in the market emitted 11.3 million tonnes in 2024, 22 per cent of Portugal’s emissions, against 42 per cent in 2005.[16] The rest falls under an EU limit set for each country, and Portugal exceeded it slightly for the first time in 2024, emitting 39.6 million tonnes against a limit of 39.3. The limit falls to 34.7 million by 2030, while those emissions have been flat at about 39.5 million for four years.[17]

Outside the carbon market, fuels pay a Portuguese carbon tax, set by law at the average price of EU allowances. When energy prices surged in 2022 the government froze it at €23.9 a tonne, while its own formula gave €45 for 2022 and €78 for 2023; it was then raised in monthly steps from May 2023 and has followed the formula again since 2026 (Figure 4).[18] The freeze came with cuts in the fuel tax that, according to Parliament’s budget office as reported in the press, cost about €1 billion a year in 2023 and 2024. After the oil shock of 2026 a new “temporary and extraordinary” discount of about 10 cents a litre on diesel was introduced, more than half of what the carbon tax adds to it.[19] The Public Finance Council itself has written that such general cuts “work as subsidies to fossil fuels”; the Climate Law commits Portugal to phasing those out by 2030.[20][13]

Fig. 4 — Price of a tonne of CO₂: annual average price of an EU emission allowance, and the Portuguese carbon tax on fuels outside the market (stepped), 2008–2026; dotted, the tax its own formula would have set for 2022 and 2023. Data: ICAP and EEX auction prices; Portarias fixing the tax under the Tax Code for Excise Duties, art. 92-A.

Europe has also softened the next step. A second carbon market for road fuels and heating was due to start in 2027; in March 2026 it was postponed to 2028. Portugal is due about €1 billion from the EU’s Social Climate Fund to compensate poorer households when it starts.[21] And heavy industry still receives free allowances while a border charge on imports is phased in: in 2025 Portugal’s six cement kilns received free allowances equal to 111 per cent of what they emitted. Free allocation for these industries is cut to 97.5 per cent in 2026 and phased out by 2034, as the border charge takes its place.[22][23]

The case for these choices is not trivial. In 2022 fuel prices jumped for reasons that had nothing to do with climate policy, and a carbon price that rises on top of a supply shock falls hardest on people who must drive. But cuts in fuel taxes help most those who burn most fuel, and they signal that the price of carbon will be suspended whenever it bites.

Transport

Old cars, company cars, cheap passes

Transport is the largest part of what remains, and its turnover is slow. Portugal’s cars are 14.3 years old on average, and 28 per cent are more than twenty years old, a share that has doubled since 2015. Electric cars are 23 per cent of new sales, more than the EU’s 17 per cent, but 84 per cent of them go to companies, which enjoy tax advantages, and only 3.8 per cent of the cars on the road are electric.[24][25] At the pace of new sales, replacing the whole fleet takes almost thirty years.

Cheaper public transport has been the other lever. Monthly passes in the metropolitan areas were cut sharply in 2019, and a national rail pass of €20 a month followed in 2024. The official evaluation found that ridership rose by 23 to 30 per cent on several lines in the first year, but its estimate of the emissions avoided assumed that every new passenger had left a car, which makes it an upper bound.[26] Road transport emissions were higher in 2024 than in 2019.[1] The passes made travel cheaper, which was their main purpose; they have not yet bent the curve.

Who pays

Cheap power, cold homes

Portugal has cheap electricity and cold houses (Figure 5). In 2025, 15.6 per cent of the Portuguese said they could not keep their home adequately warm, the fifth highest share in the EU and almost twice the EU average; among people with low incomes, 31 per cent. The share has fallen steadily from 40 per cent in 2005. Twenty-nine per cent live in homes with leaks or damp, against 16 per cent in the EU.[27] Two-thirds of the housing stock was built before the first thermal regulations of 1990.[28]

Fig. 5 — Share of people unable to keep their home adequately warm, Portugal, Portuguese with incomes below 60 per cent of the median, Spain and the EU, 2005–2025, per cent. Data: Eurostat, EU-SILC (ilc_mdes01).

Much climate spending has not reached those homes. The subsidy for buying an electric car, €4,000, went to between 2.5 and 4 per cent of electric-car buyers in recent years. The programme for renovating homes, by the government’s own account, reached mainly “middle-income households with some capacity to invest”; households had to pay first and be reimbursed later; vouchers of €1,300 for vulnerable families were used by about 9,500 households against a target of 100,000.[28][29] The social electricity tariff, a 33.8 per cent discount paid for by producers and retailers, reaches about one in eight residential customers.[30]

Local costs

Where the new energy lands

The transition also has costs where its equipment is built. Europe wants lithium for batteries, and the largest mine planned in Portugal lies in the Barroso region, which was recognised in 2018 by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization as a site of globally important agricultural heritage. The environment agency’s evaluation commission first gave the mine an unfavourable opinion; after the project was changed, the agency approved it in May 2023 with a long list of conditions, from protecting the river to a corridor for wolves. Local owners and common-land councils have won temporary injunctions against access to the land, and the EU named the project “strategic” in 2025, which caps permitting times.[31][32] The lithium concessions were also among the subjects of the corruption investigation announced in November 2023, on the day the prime minister resigned; by late 2025, according to press reports, no charges had been brought.[33]

Solar farms take land. In the Alentejo, a study of solar installations found that almost 40 per cent had replaced farmland and that more than 32 per cent of the area occupied had been woodland, including cork and holm oak, which the law protects.[34] The environmental assessments show both approval and refusal. Of 113 solar projects in the environment agency’s register, 70 were approved with conditions and 9 refused, and another 8 had their studies rejected; among the refused, a 705-megawatt plant at Nisa that would have covered about 1,000 hectares, and in December 2025 the evaluation commission gave an unfavourable opinion on the Sophia plant near Fundão, which would have fenced 1,737 hectares and affected more than 1,500 protected cork and holm oaks.[35] Nationally, the area licensed for solar plants is still small, about a fifth of one per cent of the country. Coal also had its costs when it went: around a hundred workers at Sines lost contract jobs, and the EU’s Just Transition Fund has €224 million for the three regions that lost coal plants and a refinery.[36]

The objection

Does Portugal matter?

Portugal emits 0.09 per cent of the world’s fossil carbon dioxide and has 0.13 per cent of its people, so it could be argued that its effort changes nothing. Three things weigh against that. The targets are EU law, binding whatever their effect abroad. Counted by what the Portuguese consume, including imported goods, their emissions are a third higher than the territorial figure. And the fall in the cost of solar power and batteries came from many countries each installing more; Portugal’s auctions were part of that.[37][12]

The balance

The easy half is done

The test supports The Three Goals on one point: Portugal’s emissions have fallen because of how electricity is made, not because anyone worked less, and the next cuts also depend on energy and prices, not hours. It qualifies it on another. The past rate of decline was mostly the closure of coal plants, a switch that cannot be repeated. What remains is spread across millions of cars, boilers, cattle and houses, where Portugal has never cut emissions fast, where the price of carbon has been frozen, discounted or postponed whenever it rose, and where the costs fall on people with old cars and cold homes.

Halving emissions again by 2050 looks achievable on present trends. A 90 per cent cut needs a pace no country has sustained, and a choice Portugal has so far avoided: either a carbon price that is allowed to bite in transport and heating, with the revenue returned to the households that pay it, or regulation and public investment on a much larger scale. Both cost money and political will; the evidence of the last four years is that the will has been in shorter supply than the technology.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data research, analysis and drafting. The figures and derived numbers are computed by scripts/energy.py from Eurostat’s greenhouse gas inventory (submitted in 2026, data to 2024), Ember’s electricity data, EEA and ICAP carbon-market data and the Portarias fixing the carbon tax. Emissions exclude land use and forests unless stated; per-person rates use Eurostat population. The rates in Figure 3 are average annual changes over the best ten-year window in each sector since 1990; the international rates are for fossil carbon dioxide from the Global Carbon Budget and are not strictly comparable. The cost of the fuel-tax discounts is taken from press reports of the report by Parliament’s budget office (UTAO), which was not read directly. The area licensed for solar plants is the author’s sum from DGEG’s map layer, which is incomplete. Results are in docs/energy-results.json and the figures in docs/energy-figures.html; the downloaded sources, with the dataset code or page for every number, are kept with the script’s data.

The cover photograph is Sines October 2021-1 by Alvesgaspar; CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Related essays on this blog

1. The Three Goals — time, the planet and satisfaction together.
2. Growth of What — GDP and what it leaves out, including the environment.
3. Off the Treadmill — policies for an economy that needs less growth.
4. The Second Derivative — why climate change is accelerating; Part IV looks at the grid.
5. Work, Time and Money — the reading guide to the whole series.
6. What We Found — the conclusions of the whole series in ten points.

Sources

1. Eurostat, greenhouse gas emissions by source sector (env_air_gge), data updated 2 June 2026 (inventory submission 2026, data to 2024), and population (demo_pjan); author’s shares, rates and projections.
2. Governo de Portugal, Plano Nacional Energia e Clima 2030, revised version approved by Resolução do Conselho de Ministros 149/2024, 30 October 2024, pp. 17, 59–63 and 73.
3. International Energy Agency, Portugal 2021 Energy Policy Review, IEA, 2021, pp. 12 and 14.
4. ICAP, Allowance Price Explorer, EU ETS daily prices, and EEX primary auction results; author’s annual averages.
5. Ember, yearly electricity data (release_generation_yearly_global), downloaded 30 September 2026; DGEG, Estatísticas rápidas das renováveis, December 2025; author’s shares and rates.
6. Eurostat, share of energy from renewable sources (nrg_ind_ren); REN, Dados Técnicos 2025, March 2026, pp. 4 and 7.
7. DGEG, jury of the solar auction, Resultado final, 7 August 2019, p. 1, and Resultados globais do Leilão Solar 2020, 3 September 2020, p. 1; Governo de Portugal, “Novo leilão solar garante poupança anual de 37,2 milhões aos consumidores”, 26 August 2020.
8. Despacho Conjunto 1/SEAMB/SEENC, 22 February 2024, p. 2; Despacho 170/MAEN/2025, 14 May 2025, p. 1 (DGEG).
9. ENTSO-E, ICS Investigation Expert Panel, Grid Incident in Spain and Portugal on 28 April 2025: Final Report, 20 March 2026, pp. 6, 21, 22, 24, 28 and 453.
10. Comité para el análisis de las circunstancias que concurrieron en la crisis de electricidad del 28 de abril de 2025, Informe (versión no confidencial), Gobierno de España, 17 June 2025, pp. 66, 107 and 131.
11. Eurostat, electricity prices for household consumers (nrg_pc_204) and non-household consumers (nrg_pc_205), second half of 2025; author’s comparisons.
12. R. Way, M. Ives, P. Mealy and J. D. Farmer, “Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition”, Joule 6(9), 2022; INET Oxford Working Paper 2021-01, pp. 3–4.
13. Lei 98/2021 (Lei de Bases do Clima), Diário da República 1st series 253, 31 December 2021, arts. 18, 19, 28 and 40.
14. N. Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, HM Treasury, 2006, ch. 8, p. 203.
15. Global Carbon Budget 2025 via Our World in Data (fossil CO₂ by country) and Maddison Project GDP; author’s fastest ten-year rates with GDP growing at least 1 per cent a year.
16. European Environment Agency, EU Emissions Trading System data viewer, version September 2026; author’s share of Portugal’s inventory total.
17. Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente, Memorando sobre emissões de GEE: Inventário Nacional de Emissões 2026 (1990–2024), 2026, p. 2.
18. Código dos Impostos Especiais de Consumo, art. 92-A (Lei 82-D/2014); Portarias 6-A/2019, 42/2020, 277/2020, 315/2021, 113-A/2023, 150-A/2023, 187-B/2023, 244-A/2023, 189-A/2024, 203-A/2024 and 355-A/2024; AT, Ofício Circulado 25086, 17 November 2025; author’s formula values from EEX auctions.
19. ECO, 13 March 2026, reporting UTAO, Relatório de Execução Orçamental, Dezembro de 2025; Portaria 437-B/2026, 26 September 2026; author’s per-litre conversion.
20. Conselho das Finanças Públicas, Parecer 04/2026, July 2026, pp. 4–5 (Caixa 1).
21. Regulation (EU) 2026/667, 11 March 2026, arts. 1–2; Regulation (EU) 2023/955, art. 10 and Annex II.
22. European Commission, Union Registry, verified emissions for 2025 and free allocation, extracted 1 April 2026; author’s ratio for the six Portuguese cement installations.
23. Directive (EU) 2023/959, art. 10a(1a) of Directive 2003/87/EC as amended; Regulation (EU) 2023/956 (CBAM), arts. 32 and 36.
24. ACAP, Estatísticas do Sector Automóvel, 2026 edition, pp. 39, 92 and 94; Eurostat (road_eqs_carpda, road_eqr_carpda); ACEA, new car registrations, December 2025, p. 3.
25. ICCT, European Market Monitor: Cars and Vans, 15 January 2026.
26. PlanAPP and IMT, Programa de Apoio à Redução Tarifária: Relatório 2019, September 2020, pp. 6–7.
27. Eurostat, EU-SILC: inability to keep home adequately warm (ilc_mdes01), 2005–2025; leaking roof, damp or rot (ilc_mdho01), 2023.
28. Estratégia Nacional de Longo Prazo para o Combate à Pobreza Energética 2023–2050, Resolução do Conselho de Ministros 11/2024, 8 January 2024, pp. 14, 15 and 44.
29. Fundo Ambiental, notices for the electric-vehicle purchase incentive, 2023–2026; author’s share of electric cars sold.
30. ERSE, social electricity tariff: discount, beneficiaries and cost, 2021–2025.
31. Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente, Nota à Comunicação Social 42/2023, “AIA da Ampliação da Mina do Barroso”, 31 May 2023, pp. 2–3; FAO, “Barroso Agro-Sylvo-Pastoral System, Portugal”, GIAHS.
32. European Commission, Decision C(2025) 1904, 25 March 2025, annex pp. 2–4, and press release IP/25/864; Observador, 1 June 2026, on the second injunction.
33. Procuradoria-Geral da República, press note on the DCIAP inquiry, 7 November 2023, p. 2; ECO, 7 November 2025.
34. F. Poggi, B. Pérez-Pérez and P. Díaz-Cuevas, “Solar sprawl in rural areas? A comparative study between Andalusia and Alentejo regions”, Proceedings of the XVIII Iberian Colloquium of Geography, 2024, pp. 390–392; Decreto-Lei 169/2001, arts. 2–3.
35. Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente, SIAIA register of environmental impact assessments (solar projects), consulted 30 September 2026, author’s count; DIA for the Nisa photovoltaic plant (AIA 3511), 5 July 2023, pp. 4–5; opinion of the evaluation commission on the Sophia photovoltaic plant (AIA 3800), 23 December 2025, pp. 6, 114 and 118–119.
36. DGEG, licensed solar plants map layer, downloaded 30 September 2026 (author’s sum of areas); Sábado, 30 December 2020; European Commission, Cohesion Open Data, Just Transition Fund Portugal, December 2025.
37. Global Carbon Budget 2025 via Our World in Data: territorial and consumption-based CO₂, 2023–2024; author’s shares.