Bavaria retires last major coal plant, nuclear exit did not increase utilisation

Southern German state Bavaria will retire its last major coal plant this week because the plant in Zolling near Munich was used less and less, also after the country completed its nuclear phase-out in 2023, public broadcaster BR reported. The plant with a capacity of 500 megawatts will be taken off the grid on 21 January. The decision to retire the plant was already made in 2022, after operator Onyx Power was awarded more than 46 million euros in an auction by the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) in return for transferring the Zolling plant into Germany’s reserve, where it will remain ready to be used as backup capacity if needed until 2031.

According to reserch institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had an utilisation ratio of only 24 percent in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for using the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.

Germany’s total coal use in 2024 was at its lowest level in decades. BNetzA has ceased auctions for retiring coal plants early and will in the future mandate closures of the oldest plants without compensation. Germany plans to end coal-fired power production in 2038 at the very latest, with coal regions in eastern Germany so far remaining the only ones to rule out an earlier end date.

An analysis by BNetzA publised in late 2024 showed that disruptions to electricity supply within the German network remained around the ten-year average in 2023, the year in which the country had to deal both with the fallout of the energy crisis and completed the nuclear phase-out.