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Power plants, power lines (in North Rhine-Westphalia): imbalance in the system
Photo:
IMAGO/Jochen Tack
Household appliances should stand still if possible, batteries should be charged at a different time: the electricity network operator TransnetBW called on people in Baden-Württemberg to save electricity between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Sunday in order to avoid a bottleneck.
However, that does not mean that power cuts are to be feared, the company emphasized in a statement.
The background to the unusual but not new appeal is, of all things, the high feed-in from wind turbines in northern Germany.
A spokeswoman explained: "It's like a traffic jam on the motorway."
Meanwhile, in the south, operators are throttling the output of conventional power plants because they don't make any money with the systems - the flood of electricity on the coast is pushing down the price, which is always applicable nationwide.
Meanwhile, there are too few wind turbines in the south to significantly alleviate the problem.
In order to defuse the imbalance, more than 500 megawatts of power plant capacity are to be purchased from abroad for Baden-Württemberg - in accordance with the so-called redispatch process.
According to TransnetBW, citizens can make an active contribution to keeping these extra deliveries as low as possible and the power grid stable by adjusting their electricity consumption.
Last but not least, in this way they reduce the costs for the complex power flow management.
In 2021, network operators paid 589.7 million euros for such measures.
This money is passed on to the electricity customers via the network charges.
App from the network operator shows red for the evening
There are always redispatch measures to varying degrees.
"The gradual phase-out of nuclear energy and the increased feed-in of electricity from renewable energies are affecting the load flows in the grid and are causing grid operators to have to carry out redispatch measures more frequently than before," says the Federal Network Agency.
Since grid expansion is not that far along, there are often imbalances between the high level of electricity generation, for example from wind power in the north, and consumption in the south.
For consumers, TransnetBW has developed the “PowerGethought” app: it shows “Yellow” for Sunday during the day and thus advises bringing power consumption forward or postponing it, for example with washing machines and dishwashers.
At 5 p.m. the traffic light turns red.
That means: reduce consumption.
Such measures were not necessary in the north – on the contrary.
This is also underlined by the German electricity mix on Sunday.
By early afternoon, a whopping 64 percent of the electricity generated nationwide came from wind turbines.
In Schleswig-Holstein, the weather was ideal for motorists to plug their e-vehicle into a socket.
nis/dpa
