Abstract
In recent years, electricity production from wind turbines and photovoltaic systems has grown significantly in Germany. To determine the multiple impacts of rising variable renewable energies on an increasingly decentralized power supply, spatially and temporally resolved data on the power generation are necessary or, at least, very helpful. Because of extensive data protection regulations in Germany, especially for smaller operators of renewable power plants, such detailed data are not freely accessible. In order to fill this information gap, simulation models employing publicly available plant and weather data can be used. The numerical simulations are performed for the year 2016 and consider an ensemble of almost 1.64 million variable renewable power plants in Germany. The obtained time series achieve a high agreement with measured feed-in patterns over the investigated year. Such disaggregated power generation data are very advantageous to analyze the energy transition in Germany on a spatiotemporally resolved scale. In addition, this study also derives meaningful key figures for such an analysis and presents the generated results as detailed maps at county level. To the best of our knowledge, such highly resolved electricity data of variable renewables for the entire German region have never been shown before.
Highlights
The rapid expansion of renewable energies with the accompanying de-carbonization of the power provision is essential to mitigate climate change
In Germany, the installed capacity of onshore turbines has grown from 6.1 GW when the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) first entered into force in 2000 to an almost nine-fold value of 54.4 GW at the end of 2020
As a further statistical evaluation of the simulation results, a Pearson correlation between the first differences for the daily values of both time series was applied according to Equation (1): generated by all onshore turbines and photovoltaic systems in Germany for 2016 [33], the a Pearson correlation between the first differences for the daily values of both time series was applied according to Equation (1): RXY = q
Summary
The rapid expansion of renewable energies with the accompanying de-carbonization of the power provision is essential to mitigate climate change. The installed capacity of photovoltaic systems increased in Germany from 0.1 to 53.8 GW [2] These figures are expected to rise substantially because of the further reduction of the levelized costs of electricity [3] and the necessary transformation of the power sector, e.g., to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045, according to the latest amendment of the Federal Climate Change Act (KSG 2021). This work, which combines disaggregated power generation data from the simulation models with spatially downscaled electricity consumption data to gain further insights into the energy transition in Germany, ends in Section 5 with brief conclusions. All data used for the simulations, including their characteristics and origin, are introduced
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