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Photo: Michael Reichel / dpa
The need for power lines in Germany has increased again.
This emerges from the new network development plan that the four electricity network operators 50Hertz, Amprion, Tennet and Transnet want to present on Friday and which is available to SPIEGEL.
According to this, another high-voltage road with two gigawatts of transmission capacity has to be built between the villages of Heide in Schleswig-Holstein and Klein Rogahn in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Another line could be necessary between Rastede in Lower Saxony and Bürstadt in Hesse if the federal government pursues a rather ambitious hydrogen strategy by 2035.
On the high seas, the grids must also be strengthened according to the paper in order to conduct additional electricity from offshore wind farms on land.
According to various scenarios, measures between 590 and 720 kilometers are necessary.
The main reason for the additional network requirement is the so-called sector coupling, through which economic areas beyond the energy sector should become CO2-free as quickly as possible.
In concrete terms, this means that more electric cars are to be used in traffic, while electricity-driven heat pumps are used to heat buildings.
The federal government also wants to produce so-called green hydrogen on a large scale using green electricity and save additional CO₂ in the transport, heating and industrial sectors (you can read here how this works exactly).
Due to the sector coupling, the electricity demand in Germany is likely to rise again significantly, according to the network development plan.
As a result, the networks would have to be expanded accordingly in order to be able to transport the electricity.
The construction of new power lines, however, often provokes public protests and is therefore already well behind the schedule of the transmission system operators.
As a result, the power lines are already often overloaded - which leads to a waste of taxpayers' money.
If there is too much electricity in the grids, the conventional power plants first have to shut down their production.
Only when their full potential for eliminating network congestion has been exhausted, green electricity systems may also be curtailed.
Since the purchase of their electricity is actually mandatory, the system operators are compensated as a result.
The costs for this are added to the consumer's electricity bill.
According to estimates by the Federal Network Agency, up to 1.34 billion euros in compensation for so-called feed-in management were incurred last year.
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