Economy power grids
These delays make the energy transition more expensive by billions
As of: 06:23 a.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes
Source: dpa/Silas Stein
The energy industry expects billions in costs every year because the expansion of the electricity grid is making slow progress. The south is also to blame for this, as it is expanding renewable energies too slowly. This means that expensive “network congestion management” will be necessary for years to come.
The German energy industry is expecting additional billions in costs to stabilize the German power grid in the next few years. The main causes include the delay in network expansion and the insufficient expansion of renewable energies in the south of the country compared to the high demand. According to associations, companies and economists, these factors will make complex so-called network congestion management necessary in the coming years.
There are no figures yet on the costs of this bottleneck management for the entire year 2023. According to the Federal Network Agency, expenditure in the first half of last year amounted to more than 1.6 billion euros, and in 2022 as a whole it was 4.2 billion, partly due to the increase in gas prices.
The network operator Tennet assumes that it could take around ten years to reduce the costs of network interventions to a minimum. According to the Federal Association of the Energy and Water Industry (BDEW), it is difficult to predict whether the redispatch measures could possibly increase further. “In the short term, no reduction in redispatch costs can be expected,” recently predicted Kerstin Andreae, chairwoman of the BDEW board of directors.
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But what does “bottleneck management” mean? In the north, significantly more green electricity is produced than consumed; in the south it is exactly the opposite. That’s why more electricity needs to be transported from the north to the south. Because the construction of the “Südlink” and “Südostlink” high-voltage lines has been delayed for years, the line capacity is often not sufficient. Green electricity systems – including many wind turbines in the north – will then be “curtailed”. In the south of Germany, conventional power plants will then have to be started up, which produce much more expensive electricity.
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