News Digest Item
02 May 2018

Germany again meets around 100 percent of power demand with renewables

Clean Energy Wire / Federal Network Agency

Germany's renewable power production briefly exceeded the entire country's electricity demand on 1 May, data provided by the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) suggests. Renewable power output on the windy and sunny public holiday reached 53,987 megawatt hours (MWh) at 1pm, while consumption reached 53,768 MWh, according to the BNetzA’s live energy data portal smard.de. The data suggests that renewable power production exceeded consumption for about two and a half hours. Germany’s economy and energy minister Peter Altmaier said on social network Twitter that it was “great” that the country was able to cover its demand with renewables. “Now transmission lines take precedence so that the power can flow,” Altmaier added. Germany briefly covered 100 percent of its power demand with renewables on 1 January, another public holiday, when wind power alone covered 85 percent of demand. However, the data presented by the BNetzA is still preliminary and energy generation analysts disagree how accurate certain supply and demand measurements are. This means the actual renewables share could be below 100 percent, depending on the methodology and data accuracy.

Find the BNetzA’s live data portal in English here.

For background, read the CLEW article Renewables cover about 100% of German power use for first time ever.

All texts created by the Clean Energy Wire are available under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” . They can be copied, shared and made publicly accessible by users so long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

Journalism for the energy transition

Get our Newsletter
Join our Network
Find an interviewee