Energy-Charts
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According to the data gathered on energy-charts.info, the first half of 2023 saw the lowest production of electricity by fossil fuels since 2015. With 387 TWh (31.7% of load) from conventional sources it surpassed the previous low for a first half year of 400.9 TWh (32.1%) in 2020 by nearly 14 TWh or 3.5%.

At the same time renewables provided for more power than ever with 519.3 TWh providing 42.6% of the load.

Other records for a first half year in 2023 (see the bottom of the energy-charts page):

  • lowest nuclear power production

  • lowest fossil peat production

  • lowest load

  • highest pumped hydro usage (consumption+production)

  • highest offshore wind production (23.922 TWh)

  • highest onshore wind production (195.399 TWh)

  • highest solar power production (98.698 TWh)

This marks a notable shift towards green energy compared to the first half of 2022: renewables increased from 488.8 TWh in the first half of 2022 to 519.3 TWh in the first half this year, while fossil fuels decreased from 475.3 TWh to 387 TWh.

  • @mholiv
    8•1 year ago

    Nice. Let’s pump up nuclear and renewable. We need to drop CO2 asap.

      • @schroedingershat
        3•1 year ago

        For the 3 hours or so of storage needed to exceed the grid penetration possible with nuclear due to its inflexibility there are individual storage production factories being constructed every few weeks that exceed the scale of the entire nuclear industry.

        Then there is also thermal storage, existing hydro as dispatch, pumped hydro, w2e, and load shifting,

          • @[email protected]
            1•1 year ago

            Because conservative politicans are corrupt, so the massive slowed down the construction of new renewables, while also accelrating the nuclear exit as much as possible. That being said, there is a for Nordlink and the massive North Sea project, namely that Norway has a lot of hydro, which can act as a battery for Germany. Norway has 85TWh in hydro storage, that is two months of German electricity consumption. Obviously that requires a lot of transport infrastructure, but offshore wind parks need power lines anyway and they are activly being worked on. Sweden also has a good bit of hydro. You can see the massive exports towards Sweden and Norway partly via Denmark already, when there is some actual overproduction.

            There is some other stuff too, namely hydro in the Alps and battery storage.

              • @[email protected]
                2•1 year ago

                Just to be clear, fossil fuel electricit production is decreasing in Germany for years now. The renewable built up was fast enough for that. So it is not burning fossil fuels again, as that would imply increasing the amount of fossil fuels burned.

                Right now the situation is that hard coal is too expensive, natural gas despite the Russia situation is a bit better, but not exactly great and lignite should loose money since 2019, but got lucky with the gas crisis and France massive nuclear problems. Given how fast solar is being added right now and the accelerating built up of wind, especially offshore, I would not be surprised, if Germany hits 80% renewables within the next five years.

          • @schroedingershat
            1•1 year ago

            Because their rollout was sabotaged by right wing morons after already comitting to replacing said nuclear with renewables.

            In spite of that they are partially responsible for the renewable industry covering net new electricity growth worldwide, so you should thank them.

      • @Sol3dwellerOP
        2•1 year ago

        Not the one you are asking but:

        Why does battery technology not exist? It seems to be increasingly in use?

        As for the question: a fairly good overview on balancing options and the challenges in decarbonizing the energy system is offered in the 6th assessment report by working group 3 of the IPCC (PDF). See Box 6.8 on page 675, which lists an overview on balancing options, where nuclear power is one of many:

        There are many balancing options in systems with very high renewables (Milligan et al. 2015; Jenkins et al. 2018b; Mai et al. 2018; Bistline 2021a; Denholm et al. 2021).

        • Energy storage. Energy storage technologies like batteries, pumped hydro, and hydrogen can provide a range of system services (Balducci et al. 2018; Bistline et al. 2020a) (Section 6.4.4). Lithium-ion batteries have received attention as costs fall and installations increase, but very high renewable shares typically entail either dispatchable generation or long-duration storage in addition to short-duration options (Jenkins et al. 2018b; Arbabzadeh et al. 2019; Schill 2020). Energy storage technologies are part of a broad set of options (including synchronous condensers, demand-side measures, and even inverter-based technologies themselves) for providing grid services (Castillo and Gayme 2014; EPRI 2019a).

        • Transmission and trade. To balance differences in resource availability, high renewable systems will very likely entail investments in transmission capacity (Mai et al. 2014; Macdonald et al. 2016; Pleßmann and Blechinger 2017; Zappa et al. 2019) (Section 6.4.5) and changes in trade (Abrell and Rausch 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). These increases will likely be accompanied by expanded balancing regions to take advantage of geographical smoothing.

        • Dispatchable (‘on-demand’) generation. Dispatchable generation could include flexible fossil units or low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen with lower minimum load levels (Denholm et al. 2018; Bistline 2019), renewables like hydropower, geothermal, or biomass (Hirth 2016; Hansen et al. 2019), or flexible nuclear (Jenkins et al. 2018a). The composition depends on costs and other policy goals, though in all cases, capacity factors are low for these resources (Mills et al. 2020).

        • Demand management: Many low-emitting and high-renewables systems also utilise increased load flexibility in the forms of energy efficiency, demand response, and demand flexibility, utilising newly electrified end uses such as electric vehicles to shape demand profiles to better match supply (Ameli et al. 2017; Hale 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Imelda et al. 2018a; Bistline 2021a).

        • Sector coupling: Sector coupling includes increased end-use electrification and PtX electricity conversion pathways, which may entail using electricity to create synthetic fuels such as hydrogen (Davis et al. 2018; Ueckerdt et al. 2021) (Sections 6.4.3, 6.4., 6.4.5, 6.6.4.3, and 6.6.4.6).

        Deployment of integration options depends on their relative costs and value, regulations, and electricity market design. There is considerable uncertainty about future technology costs, performance, availability, scalability, and public acceptance (Kondziella and Bruckner 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). Deploying balanced resources likely requires operational, market design, and other institutional changes, as well as technological changes in some cases (Denholm et al. 2021; Cochran et al. 2014). Mixes will differ based on resources, system size, flexibility, and whether grids are isolated or interconnected.

        Given the wealth of technological options and developments, why narrow down the view on a single solution and pretend that it is the only one?

      • phosphorik
        1•1 year ago

        Seriously. You can’t make an omelette without splitting a few atoms, at least for now. Especially since at the moment it’s fairly straightforward to look at our carbon emissions and figure out that if we don’t switch to nuclear our ecology won’t last long enough for disposal of nuclear waste to be the thing that kills us.

        • sveri
          3•1 year ago

          Sure, Germany just proves the opposite, but, whatever, who cares.

            • @schroedingershat
              2•1 year ago

              You are entirely correct. The energy policy of hamstringing wind and solar development for 5 years was terrible. Turns out that even with a hostile government, the technology was able to follow through on replacing all of the nuclear reactors that were EOL and replace a third of the fossil fuels.

              Imagine how much better it would have been without people like you sabotaging it?