2020 was an unusual year for green electricity. A lot of wind and little consumption caused the green electricity quota in Germany to rise sharply. This year it looks different again.
Green electricity from wind, sun and other renewable energy sources covered 42.7 percent of gross electricity consumption in Germany from January to September of this year. That is significantly less than in the same period last year.
However, it is roughly at the level of the pre-Corona year 2019, as preliminary calculations by the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW) show. In the first nine months of 2020, green electricity supplied 47.8 percent of consumption, in 2019 it was 42.9 percent in this period.
The higher share of renewable energies in electricity consumption in the previous year was characterized by an unusually windy first quarter of 2020 and a significantly lower electricity consumption due to the Corona restrictions, the BDEW reported on Tuesday. In total, almost 178 billion kilowatt hours of green electricity were generated in the first three quarters of 2021. In the same period last year it was a good 191 billion kilowatt hours. At the same time, gross domestic electricity consumption rose from a good 400 to around 416 billion kilowatt hours.
Great influence of the weather
The influence of the weather on green electricity production is particularly evident in wind energy. Onshore wind turbines are the most important producers of green electricity. With a good 63 billion kilowatt hours, their electricity yield this year has so far been 16.7 percent below the previous year’s figure. And the amount of wind power was also higher in the first nine months of 2019. The chairman of the BDEW management board, Kerstin Andreae, therefore called for more speed in the expansion of wind energy on land with a view to the beginning of the formation of a government.
The construction of new wind turbines had stalled in recent years. In 2020, only 420 systems were added on land in Germany. This made 2020 the second weakest expansion year since the introduction of the Renewable Energy Sources Act in 2000 – after 2019, when a low had been reached. It looks better with photovoltaics. Their contribution to electricity generation is increasing steadily – from a good 40 billion kilowatt hours in 2019 to almost 46 billion kilowatt hours this year.
The relatively weak wind and the renewed rise in electricity consumption have led to more electricity being generated using coal. According to the BDEW figures, the share of lignite and hard coal in electricity generation in Germany rose from around 22 percent to 27 percent.
There are various ways of determining the green electricity quota in Germany. Measured against the total amount of electricity generated in Germany, the share of green electricity in the first nine months was 41.7 percent. The BDEW takes the gross electricity consumption as a benchmark. Electricity exports to other countries are not taken into account. Here the green electricity quota is 42.7 percent.
The Federal Statistical Office, in turn, only takes into account the amount of electricity generated domestically and fed into the public power grid. This does not include electricity that is generated and consumed by industrial companies themselves. On this basis, the Wiesbaden authority determined a share of green electricity of 44 percent for the first half of 2021 (first half of 2020: 51.9 percent).
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
