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The Hessian coal power plant Staudinger near Hanau.
Operator Uniper wants to take it off the grid in 2025
Photo: Frank Rumpenhorst / dpa
Despite the coal phase-out, hard coal and lignite became the most important source of electricity generation in Germany in the first half of 2021.
Compared to the same period last year, the generation of coal-fired power plants increased by 35.5 percent to 70.2 billion kilowatt hours, the Federal Statistical Office announced on Monday.
Coal-fired power plants thus had a share of 27.1 percent in the German electricity mix.
Wind turbines, on the other hand, only produced 57 billion kilowatt hours due to frequent lulls: a good fifth less than a year ago.
As a result, their share of the total fell by seven percentage points to 22.1 percent.
In 2020, wind farms generated more electricity than coal-fired power plants for the first time.
Now the ranking has reversed again.
Overall, electricity generation increased by four percent compared to the first six months of 2020. One reason for this may have been that at the beginning of the pandemic, some industrial companies temporarily shut down their factories, but are now producing at full capacity again.
In the course of the energy transition, the nuclear power plants in this country are to be shut down by the end of 2022 and the coal-fired power plants by 2038.
In return, renewable energy sources such as wind, photovoltaics and biogas should play an increasingly important role.
However, their production fluctuates due to the dependence on the weather - also in the first, low-wind half of 2021.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, conventional power plants - mainly coal, gas and nuclear energy - accounted for around 56 percent of electricity production from January to the end of June.
In 2020 it was 53 percent.
che / Reuters
