Renewables provide for 35 percent of energy consumption in Latvia (2013). This puts Latvia on the second place in Europe (after Sweden) and it is likely that Latvia will reach its 2020 target of a 40 percent share of renewables.

78 percent of the renewable energy produced in Latvia is coming from fuelwood (2013). (Due to its availability, wood has traditionally been an important resource in Latvia.) And herein lies a potential problem because further increasing renewables in Latvia may not be sustainable if solar and wind are not playing a bigger role.

Apart from the threat to biodiversity that logging can entail, cutting trees and burning them to produce energy has two negative effects. It reduces the available capacity to store carbon from the atmosphere (carbon sink) and releases the CO2 that was captured by the tree. The term renewable energy is therefore rather misleading in this context.