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22 Oct 2020, 13:47
Kerstine Appunn

12 minutes per year: Germany has shortest time of power black-outs ever

Clean Energy Wire

Interruptions in Germany’s electricity supply were at their lowest in 2019 since the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) started collecting this data in 2006, the agency reported. The average interruption time per connected end consumer fell to 12.20 minutes per year, down by 1.71 minutes compared to 2018. "The energy transition and the increasing share of decentralised generation capacity continue to have no negative impact on the quality of supply,” Jochen Homann, president of the network agency said in a press release.

The network agency receives the data on all supply interruptions longer than three minutes from grid operators which are unplanned and not due to acts of nature beyond control. From this it determines the so-called SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index), which is conducted in a similar way in other countries. Germany ranks among the countries with the highest electric supply security in the world. Black-out times in the United Kingdom are around 46 minutes and in the United States citizens went without power for an average of almost eight hours in 2017.

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