Status: 12/12/2022 3:51 p.m
German energy suppliers receive compensation from consumers if they are unable to feed in their electricity due to grid bottlenecks. A high was recorded last year.
The slow expansion of the grid in Germany is causing ever higher costs – for example due to the compensation payments to the electricity producers. Last year, energy suppliers received a record sum of around 807 million euros for electricity that could not be fed into the grid. This is reported by the editorial network Germany (RND), citing the response of the Federal Ministry of Economics (BMWK) to a request from the left.
Non-feed current at peak
According to this, the German electricity producers were unable to feed around 5,800 gigawatt hours of electricity from last year’s production into the grid. In 2020, the amount of compensation was 761 million euros, in 2018 it was 635 million euros and in 2016 around 373 million euros. The consumer bears the compensation costs, since they are passed on to the network charges.
Electricity producers are entitled to compensation via so-called feed-in management if the electricity they produce cannot be transported to consumers due to grid bottlenecks. According to BWMK, wind turbines are particularly affected.
Left criticizes the burden on consumers
When it comes to the distribution of compensation payments across the federal states, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein are way ahead, as there are a particularly large number of wind turbines here. In 2021, around 45.4 percent of payments for unused electricity went to Lower Saxony and 31.9 percent to Schleswig-Holstein.
“It is grotesque that we are discussing the danger of blackouts and at the same time electricity worth over 800 million euros is being thrown away every year,” said Dietmar Bartsch, leader of the left-wing parliamentary group, to RND. Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck must finally get the sluggish network expansion going and protect consumers from such costs.
Measures for network expansion
In order to advance the expansion of the power grid in Germany, the traffic light coalition has set itself ambitious goals: According to the coalition agreement, climate protection should become a “cross-sectional task”. One building block: the so-called Easter package. The federal government wants to use this to accelerate the expansion of green electricity. By 2030, 80 percent of electricity should come from renewable sources. This means, among other things: more wind power on land and at sea, more solar systems on roofs.
With the law amending the Energy Security Act and other energy industry regulations (“EnSiG 3.0”), further measures are to be taken to accelerate grid expansion. The aim of the EnSiG is to increase electricity production from renewable energies in the short term and to increase the transport capacities in the electricity grid in order to contribute to reducing gas consumption in winter.
Furthermore, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMKW) is currently in talks with the four transmission system operators – 50Hertz, Amprion, Transnet BW and Tennet – on a “short-term action plan for optimizing the power grid”. Among other things, existing circuits should transport more electricity than usual. The next so-called grid development plan for electricity, which describes the need to expand the German electricity grid, will already consider the target year 2045.