In addition to good generation from hydropower, wind power also had a good balance, as the transmission system operator APG announced on Tuesday. At the beginning of the year, electricity consumption was almost at the level of the average consumption from 2017 to 2021. Thanks to good renewable generation, around 60 percent of the electricity requirement was covered sustainably.
The first month of the year was quite mild, but all the more windy. At 932 gigawatt hours (GWh), electricity production from wind power was around 70 percent higher than in the same month last year. Almost 2,200 GWh were generated from hydropower. Domestic electricity demand was around 5,453 GWh. Compared to the Austrian average consumption from 2017-2021, there was a weekly fluctuation range of minus 2 to plus 2 percent, i.e. almost at the same level. According to APG, the 60 percent coverage of electricity requirements by renewables was above average for January.
At the beginning of the year, electricity imports were lower than in the previous year. On January 6th, with 12 GWh in one day, more electricity was exported for the first time since September 1st, 2021. “Looking at the balance sheet, we imported 890 GWh of electricity in January. Compared to the same month last year (1,508 GWh), this means around 40 percent less electricity purchased from abroad,” says Thomas Karall, CFO of APG.
Within Austria, the wind-powerful Burgenland has fed back around 233 GWh into the APG grid. “That’s around six and a half times the amount of energy that the federal state itself had to take from the APG grid,” says Gerhard Christiner, Technical Director at APG. Lower Austria has made around 240 GWh available nationwide via the APG grid, which is more than double the amount drawn from the APG grid. The largest inner-Austrian “importer” was Carinthia with around 319 GWh.
To stabilize the grid, APG intervened on 20 days in January by means of redispatching. This caused around 3 million euros in costs. Although this is the lowest January value since 2019, “nevertheless, it is costs that the electricity customer pays in the end,” says Karall. A high-performance power grid is a prerequisite for reducing costs and interventions.
Source: Nachrichten
