Number of wind turbines in Germany down in H1 2024, total capacity up
Clean Energy Wire
The number of operational onshore wind turbines installed in Germany has shrunk in the first six months of 2024, when 250 new installations were added while 280 older ones were taken offline, the Fachagentur Windenergie has found. However, the installed capacity still increased during this period thanks to newer installations having a much greater average capacity than those that were decommissioned. While the removed turbines had a combined capacity of 380 megawatts (MW), the new installations came with a combined capacity of 1,310 MW, which was 20 percent less than the installations completed in the first half of 2023. However, the first half of 2024 saw the highest volume of newly licensed capacity ever recorded during a six-month period in the country, when almost 900 turbines with a combined capacity of more than 5,000 MW were approved.
Most new installations were built in the leading wind power state of Lower Saxony in northern Germany, followed by western state North Rhine-Westphalia and northern Schleswig-Holstein. About one third of the new installations were made in so-called repowering procedures, where older turbines are replaced with new ones at the same location. The average duration of licensing procedures finalised between January and June was 25 months, about the same time it took on average in the same period one year earlier. The subsequent implementation period for turbines entering operation in the first half of this year was 25 months as well, meaning that the average time from planning to feeding into the grid for a turbine amounted to almost four years.
The German government aims to increase the total capacity of onshore wind by about 8,000 MW per year until 2030, meaning the target practically already is out of reach for 2024. With several changes to licensing requirements, the designation of land area and other measures, the coalition of chancellor Olaf Scholz has sought to facilitate the buildout of Germany’s most important renewable power source, after the sector experienced a severe slump after 2017 that previous governments did not sufficiently address. However, these changes take time to implement and will likely only show their full effect in the next years.
