According to the data gathered on energy-charts.info, the first half of 2023 saw the lowest production of electricity by fossil fuels since 2015. With 387 TWh (31.7% of load) from conventional sources it surpassed the previous low for a first half year of 400.9 TWh (32.1%) in 2020 by nearly 14 TWh or 3.5%.
At the same time renewables provided for more power than ever with 519.3 TWh providing 42.6% of the load.
Other records for a first half year in 2023 (see the bottom of the energy-charts page):
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lowest nuclear power production
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lowest fossil peat production
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lowest load
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highest pumped hydro usage (consumption+production)
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highest offshore wind production (23.922 TWh)
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highest onshore wind production (195.399 TWh)
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highest solar power production (98.698 TWh)
This marks a notable shift towards green energy compared to the first half of 2022: renewables increased from 488.8 TWh in the first half of 2022 to 519.3 TWh in the first half this year, while fossil fuels decreased from 475.3 TWh to 387 TWh.
Also the electricity prices are becoming very intressting today at 14:00 CET prices drop to some insane levels. Germany, Hungary, Austria, Croatia, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have prices at -500€/MWh. Slovenia goes down to -1413€/MWh.
Which is a very bad news for renewables energy but a good news for the development of storage solutions.
Do I see correctly that the prices are not only negative, but also this deep into the negative? Fascinating. Is that just during the peaks of solar generation?
The old lowest price was -90€/MWh, so this is a new record and highly unusal. Basicly it is a lot of new solar in the last couple years on a sunny day, at about peak solar, combined with strong winds, which mean there is also pretty close to peak wind and it is on a Sunday so demand is low. Negative prices happend before, but usually on weekends with peak solar and a decent wind. Normally peak wind happens during storms, which naturally means low solar.
Since the increase of renewables was by 30.5 TWh and the decrease of fossil fuels was by 88.3 TWh means that the EU also produced less electricity and thus needed less of it, correct?
Yes, that is correct. The first half of 2023 was a new record low in electricity consumption for first half years (since 2015). You can also see that by toggeling the “Load” category. Extreme values in the tracked time period: maximum load 1,347 TWh in 2018 and minimum load this year with 1,219 TWh. Compared to last years first half there was:
- a reduction of load by 79.7 TWh
- a reduction of nuclear output by 11.9 TWh
- a reduction of conventional output by 88.2 TWh
- an increase of renewable output by 30.5 TWh
Finally to make the sums match up, we can look at the import balance: in the first half of 2022 the EU net imported 5.771 TWh, this year it net exported 4.23 TWh.
Nice. Let’s pump up nuclear and renewable. We need to drop CO2 asap.
Man… I bet whoever down voted this didn’t like the nuclear take.
I wonder what is their solution for the back bone of grid…
Russian gas? Or bettary technology that doesnt exist currently? 🙄
For the 3 hours or so of storage needed to exceed the grid penetration possible with nuclear due to its inflexibility there are individual storage production factories being constructed every few weeks that exceed the scale of the entire nuclear industry.
Then there is also thermal storage, existing hydro as dispatch, pumped hydro, w2e, and load shifting,
Then why didn’t Germany deploy it before shutting down nuclear but is still running fossil fuel plants?
Not the one you are asking but:
Why does battery technology not exist? It seems to be increasingly in use?
As for the question: a fairly good overview on balancing options and the challenges in decarbonizing the energy system is offered in the 6th assessment report by working group 3 of the IPCC (PDF). See Box 6.8 on page 675, which lists an overview on balancing options, where nuclear power is one of many:
There are many balancing options in systems with very high renewables (Milligan et al. 2015; Jenkins et al. 2018b; Mai et al. 2018; Bistline 2021a; Denholm et al. 2021).
• Energy storage. Energy storage technologies like batteries, pumped hydro, and hydrogen can provide a range of system services (Balducci et al. 2018; Bistline et al. 2020a) (Section 6.4.4). Lithium-ion batteries have received attention as costs fall and installations increase, but very high renewable shares typically entail either dispatchable generation or long-duration storage in addition to short-duration options (Jenkins et al. 2018b; Arbabzadeh et al. 2019; Schill 2020). Energy storage technologies are part of a broad set of options (including synchronous condensers, demand-side measures, and even inverter-based technologies themselves) for providing grid services (Castillo and Gayme 2014; EPRI 2019a).
• Transmission and trade. To balance differences in resource availability, high renewable systems will very likely entail investments in transmission capacity (Mai et al. 2014; Macdonald et al. 2016; Pleßmann and Blechinger 2017; Zappa et al. 2019) (Section 6.4.5) and changes in trade (Abrell and Rausch 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). These increases will likely be accompanied by expanded balancing regions to take advantage of geographical smoothing.
• Dispatchable (‘on-demand’) generation. Dispatchable generation could include flexible fossil units or low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen with lower minimum load levels (Denholm et al. 2018; Bistline 2019), renewables like hydropower, geothermal, or biomass (Hirth 2016; Hansen et al. 2019), or flexible nuclear (Jenkins et al. 2018a). The composition depends on costs and other policy goals, though in all cases, capacity factors are low for these resources (Mills et al. 2020).
• Demand management: Many low-emitting and high-renewables systems also utilise increased load flexibility in the forms of energy efficiency, demand response, and demand flexibility, utilising newly electrified end uses such as electric vehicles to shape demand profiles to better match supply (Ameli et al. 2017; Hale 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Imelda et al. 2018a; Bistline 2021a).
• Sector coupling: Sector coupling includes increased end-use electrification and PtX electricity conversion pathways, which may entail using electricity to create synthetic fuels such as hydrogen (Davis et al. 2018; Ueckerdt et al. 2021) (Sections 6.4.3, 6.4., 6.4.5, 6.6.4.3, and 6.6.4.6).
Deployment of integration options depends on their relative costs and value, regulations, and electricity market design. There is considerable uncertainty about future technology costs, performance, availability, scalability, and public acceptance (Kondziella and Bruckner 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). Deploying balanced resources likely requires operational, market design, and other institutional changes, as well as technological changes in some cases (Denholm et al. 2021; Cochran et al. 2014). Mixes will differ based on resources, system size, flexibility, and whether grids are isolated or interconnected.
Given the wealth of technological options and developments, why narrow down the view on a single solution and pretend that it is the only one?
Hey thanks for good DD.
I was being cheeky about battery tech since it is not a solution currently available for country level deployment.
I am sure batteries will get better within our life times, nothing against the tech. But it does need investment and development before it should.be sold as a solution to today’s problems.
Seriously. You can’t make an omelette without splitting a few atoms, at least for now. Especially since at the moment it’s fairly straightforward to look at our carbon emissions and figure out that if we don’t switch to nuclear our ecology won’t last long enough for disposal of nuclear waste to be the thing that kills us.
let’s shoot for 50 70!
You missunderstood the original post 31.7% are fossil fuels, so the other 68.3% are renewable and nuclear.
Yes, I’m sorry if I presented that confusingly. That 31.7% is new record low for a first half year, both in terms of fraction of overall load and in absolute terms. The rebound after Corona was really short-lived and hopefully we’ll see that record beaten every year from now on. Let’s shoot for 0 fossil fuels!
