First the good news: The share of renewables in net electricity generation rose from 20, 1 percent to 50, 5 percent – a new record. The Fraunhofer ISE energy charts provide a good overview.

The lower electricity consumption may have played a large part in this. This is not only due to the corona pandemic. It has fallen for the third year in a row since 2017 (just under 550 TWh). At the same time 2020 the average price on the electricity exchange fell by almost 20 Percent compared to the previous year. Why doesn’t that go down well with private households? Ask your supplier.

When adding renewables it looks, however, relatively poor. At just under four gigawatts, photovoltaics was not yet able to match its record times at the beginning of the decade, but it was able to stabilize its expansion. On the other hand, the expansion of wind power is poor. It has continued to decline and is now at the second lowest level since 2012.

Finally one more couple of records. The proportionately strongest day for renewables was July 4th, a Saturday. Around noon they supplied almost 90 percent of all German electricity. At the end of November, however, it was only 11, 5 percent.

More meaningful than these percentages, however, is the absolute level of the “residual load”, i.e. the demanded power minus the feed-in of fluctuating sources such as wind and sun. At the 10. December it was just under 62 gigawatts.

This is where the Exciting question: after all nuclear and coal-fired power plants have been shut down, would there still be enough power to handle a residual load of such magnitude? If you add up the 2020 existing gas, water and biomass power plants as well as the storage facilities, you get just under 53 Gigawatts.

That is missing – with the current load – around 9 Gigawatts that will have to be added or imported in some way over the next few years. That is roughly as much as all pumped storage plants together or a third of the existing gas-fired power plants.

(grh)