“Storm in the power grid”

Managing Germany’s power grids is becoming increasingly expensive, Klaus Stratmann writes in Handelsblatt. There has been a “massive increase” in so-called “re-dispatch” measures, where power plants are started or shut down to keep the grid stable, according to figures by the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) seen by Handelsblatt, Stratmann writes. The re-dispatch measures reached 63 percent of last year’s total volume in the first two months of 2017 alone, he explains. “The combination of volatile wind power generation and an undersized power grid proves to become ever more dangerous,” Stratmann writes. Costs for this so-called “bottleneck management” amounted to one billion euros in 2015 and are paid by power customers via the “grid fee” portion of their power bill.

Read the article in German here (behind paywall).

For background, see the CLEW news digest entry  “Lower costs for grid congestion management show positive effects of grid expansion”, the CLEW dossier The energy transition and Germany’s power grid and the factsheet What German households pay for power.