Electricity market 2022: Photovoltaics are running, offshore wind power is weakening

More wind energy, more solar power, less consumption: from the point of view of renewables, a lot went in the right direction in 2022, albeit only moderately. Photovoltaics in particular has had a relatively good year. She could do a good 18 percent more generate electricity than last year, so the Energy chart from Fraunhofer ISE.

Also the installed capacity of renewables increased slightly.

Even stronger put the German electricity export up, by more than 30 percent. The main recipients were two countries: France and Austria, each with around 15 terawatt hours net. However, all of this pales in comparison to what is probably the most remarkable number of the past year: The Exchange electricity price rose 127 percent (adjusted for inflation). Some of the reasons for this should be well known: The CO₂-Certificates and that natural gas became more expensive.

The feed-in from the wind farms also has a direct impact on the electricity price, such as this graphic shows. Overall, wind power was able to generate slightly more electricity in 2022 feed in than in the previous year, despite a weak second half of the year.

Stable wind energy offshore

Bucking the trend, however, was the production of offshore wind power. This leads to an interesting phenomenon: on the afternoon of August 9, everyone dined offshore wind farmswhether on the North Sea or the Baltic Sea, pretty much nothing at all while the wind turbines on land continued to produce. It is always said that the wind blows more reliably on the high seas. But on this late summer day it was the other way round: The historical weather data from Meteostat recorded for Borkum (North Sea) and for hidden see (Baltic Sea) at least wind speeds of a solid 12 to 15 km/h (at least 3 Beaufort). on the lightship”German bay“, west of Helgoland on the high seas, there was no wind at all for several hours at that time.

Don’t overrate this episode. Year-over-year, offshore wind farms continued to generate electricity at a much more consistent rate than onshore ones in 2022.

And such total offshore failures have also occurred again and again in recent years, for example on October 20, 2019, September 21, 2020 or December 21, 2021. What is remarkable, however, is that the onshore wind farms never delivered less in these years than 90 megawatts. This shows how important a large-scale geographical distribution of renewable energy systems is.

(grh)