Clouds to shield German power system from excessive solar feed-in over Easter, French grid strained

Cloudy weather conditions expected for the Easter weekend have alleviated fears by grid operators in Germany that a high supply of solar power during a period of low consumption could lead to challenges for transmission grid stability, industry magazine ZfK has reported. According to grid monitoring service RJ2, current trends in power prices and weather data suggest “a small to moderate excess supply” of electricity that is expected to lead to negative prices.

The grid load on Easter Sunday 2024 was 40 gigawatts (GW), ZfK said, far below the peak load of 80 GW in Germany, while the millions of solar panels installed in the country in spring routinely deliver 30 GW alone. To balance demand and supply and keep the grid stable, other installations then would have to be throttled to make room for higher solar power feed-in. However, there is a residual risk that more sunshine hours occur than anticipated, meaning grid operators still might have to resort to re-dispatch measures to manage electricity flows.

Already at the end of last year, energy system experts had warned that regional brownouts could occur as a result of excessive solar power feed-in, after the country’s solar PV capacity had grown at a fast pace in recent years. Easter weekend in mid-spring is often a period of high output for Germany’s renewable energy fleet, as lots of sunshine often routinely meet with strong winds. Coupled with low energy consumption during the long holiday weekend, this often requires intervention to balance the grid.

Grid operator Amprion said that locally limited power cuts could not be ruled out if taking part of the solar farms feeding into the grid offline does not suffice to guarantee grid stability. However, this would likely only be the case for a short period around midday, when solar PV output is highest. A new law introduced in February is meant to better regulate solar PV feed-in by cutting funding during peak hours, but it applies only to new installations and thus cannot throttle the output of existing ones, the article said.

In France, meanwhile, a mix of soaring solar capacity, strong nuclear output, and weak spring demand has created major oversupply issues, reported Montel. In response, the transmission system operator RTE has had to trigger costly emergency balancing mechanism, curtail renewables generation almost daily and call on neighbours to take surplus electricity. The situation could last until at least mid-June, said Clément Bouilloux, head of Montel Analytics France.