“Eastern Germany now secures Bavaria’s power supply”

After 15 years of construction, the new power transmission line from eastern Germany to Bavaria in the south “closes one of the most severe bottlenecks in the European power grid,” Daniel Wetzel writes in Die Welt. The 200-kilometre-long line connecting Bavaria with wind power and lignite plants further north was completed just in time, as the shut-down of Bavarian nuclear plant Gundremmingen B in December will leave a gap to be filled in Germany’s geographically largest federal state, Wetzel says. With a transmission capacity of about 5,000 megawatts (MW), the line dubbed “Thuringia Power Bridge” is capable of transferring the equivalent of the power output of five nuclear plants, Wetzel says. Boris Schucht, CEO of grid operator 50 Hertz, which covers that part of the country, says the completed transmission line was “a milestone for the Energiewende that makes a substantial contribution to enabling the nuclear phase-out.” 

Read the article in German here.

Get background in the CLEW dossier The energy transition and Germany’s power grid.