Thanks to expansion:Two-thirds of electricity produced now from renewables again
From August to September, renewable energy sources contributed almost two-thirds to electricity produced in this country. However, coal remains in third place.
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In the third quarter, electricity generation from renewable energy sources rose to 64.1 percent of the total electricity produced – the highest ever in the months of July to September. This was announced by the Federal Statistical Office, which explained that electricity from wind power supplied more than a quarter of domestic electricity at 26.8 percent, with photovoltaics accounting for another 24.1 percent. According to the report, the record highs were primarily due to "the expansion of wind turbines and photovoltaic systems." Coal, however, once again took third place with 20.6 percent, which was almost one percentage point less than in the previous year. The share of natural gas rose to 12 percent. The amount of imported electricity decreased by 11.9 percent in these three months.
Outlier at the beginning of the year
The figures now published suggest that the energy transition is continuing to progress, with a temporary trend reversal at the beginning of the year being merely an outlier. Due to unfavorable weather, the share of renewables in electricity generation had fallen so sharply in the first three months of the year that fossil fuels could once again take the top position. However, the situation turned around again in the following months, so that in the first half of the year, 57.8 percent of the electricity fed into the grid came from renewable energy sources. Conventional sources like coal together accounted for 42.2 percent, which, thanks to the unusual first quarter, was still almost four percentage points more than a year earlier.
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Furthermore, a research group recently quantified how much generated electricity no longer reaches the public grid because it is used directly on-site. While owners of photovoltaic systems only consumed 3.55 terawatt hours (TWh) themselves in 2020, this figure rose to 12.28 TWh last year. The self-consumption of the total solar power generation thus already amounts to 17 percent. The reasons cited are high electricity prices combined with low feed-in tariffs and the rapidly growing share of solar systems directly coupled with their storage. The research group believes that the increasing share of self-consumption is beneficial for the power grids.
(mho)
