Germany’s push towards green energy is being blamed for soaring energy bills – as the country’s national electricity grid struggles to meet the demands of ever-growing wind farms, experts warn.
Germany has been one of the largest consumers of wind energy, installing thousands of wind turbines and generating almost twice as much electricity in less than a decade.
However, a chronic lack of grid capacity prevents power from reaching those who need it, raising electricity costs for everyone.
And now leading energy analysts say the same could happen in Britain after Ed Miliband is accused of being ‘obsessed’ with renewable energy.
Nearly three-quarters of Germany’s wind energy projects are located offshore in the north, while the most energy-intensive industries are in the south – meaning electricity must travel the length of the country.
When this green grid produces more power than the outdated grid can handle, operators often have to pay producers to reduce their production.
Worryingly, with Labor planning to quadruple offshore wind power by 2030, experts are warning that the UK’s electricity grid could face similar problems.
Jan Rosenow, energy markets expert at the Regulatory Assistance Project, told The Telegraph: ‘The UK’s clean energy target is very aggressive, and my concern is that if we don’t get things right we risk hitting the same to encounter problems.’
Experts warn that Germany’s obsession with wind power could lead to rising energy bills as the country’s power grid fails to keep up with the glut of new energy. In the photo: wind farm off the German island of Helgoland
Germany was one of Europe’s first and most enthusiastic users of wind energy, but in recent years there have been renewed efforts to grow this green industry.
These efforts have become particularly urgent after the outbreak of war in Ukraine highlighted the country’s dependence on Russian energy imports.
Since 2014, Germany has added enough wind turbines to increase its production from 38.6 gigawatts in 2014 to just under 70 gigawatts today.
As of November this year, Germany had already added another 2.3 gigawatts, on top of another three gigawatts by 2023.
Similarly, energy generated by wind and solar energy overtook energy from fossil fuels for the first time in the first nine months of 2024.
While this is an important step towards the government’s ambition to phase out coal by 2030, it has left the electricity grid with a number of potentially disastrous imbalances.
The vast majority of German wind power generation comes from offshore projects in the North Sea, while there are also some in the Baltic Sea.
However, the majority of the energy-hungry automotive and manufacturing industries are located in the southern regions of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria.
While Germany has added more wind energy, the majority of these turbines are in the north. This leads to crippling bottlenecks in the electricity grid, because masts cannot transport enough power. When this happens, grid operators have to pay energy producers to produce less electricity. In the photo: energy pylons in Schönwalde, Germany
This means that when a steel mill in the south needs to buy electricity, it has to travel enormous distances along the ‘superhighways’ with high-voltage transmission.
At times when the wind is blowing hard and the wind farms are approaching their maximum output, the electricity grid simply does not have the capacity to transport so much power over such a long distance.
That creates crippling bottlenecks in high-voltage transmissions, preventing power from reaching where it is needed.
According to grid operator TenneT, bottlenecks in the grid have actually led to the wind turbine fleet in the North Sea producing less power in 2023 than the year before.
Despite the capacity expansion, production actually fell by nine percent year-on-year, because production must be curtailed if there is not enough transmission capacity in the grid.
This becomes especially problematic when companies in southern regions have an agreement to purchase renewable energy from a wind farm in the north.
In that case, the grid operator must intervene and pay the energy companies to reduce their production and at the same time start up an alternative energy source, usually a coal or gas power plant, closer to where the energy is needed.
According to Amprion, Germany’s largest grid operator, so-called ‘re-dispatch costs’ amounted to €3.5 billion (£2.9 billion) in 2023.
This graph shows the share of energy sources in the UK mix over the past week. On December 15, wind power set a new record by supplying more than 70 percent of the country’s energy supply
That was less than €4.2 billion (£3.5 billion) in 2022, when gas supply problems led to rising energy costs, but well above the 2021 and 2022 bill, which was €2.3 billion (£1.7 billion). billion) and €1.4 billion (£1.2 billion). billion) respectively.
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And because the growth of wind energy has outpaced investment in the electric grid, the amount of energy wasted has continued to grow.
According to the German Federal Network Agency, the grid stabilization measures have led to a loss of approximately 19 terawatt hours of energy in 2023, compared to 14 terawatt hours in 2022.
This corresponds to approximately four percent of the country’s total energy production.
Germany’s wind energy problems have now raised concerns that Britain could face similar problems under Ed Miliband’s plans for a green energy revolution.
Like Germany, most of the UK’s production is clustered in offshore wind farms in the north of the country.
This year, Britain surpassed 30 gigawatts of wind energy capacity when the Viking wind farm in the Shetland Islands was fully powered.
However, that significant growth in clean energy abundance won’t necessarily translate into lower bills if retransmission costs continue to rise due to grid bottlenecks.
In 2024 alone, Britain will have spent an ‘absurd’ £1 billion temporarily shutting down wind farms as the electricity grid struggles to keep up.
But even as Britain plans to build more network connections between the north and south (pictured), experts warn that a lack of capacity will lead to bottlenecks similar to those in Germany. These costs can be passed on to the customer, leading to higher bills for everyone
The amount of ‘restricted’ energy in the first eleven months of the year was 6.6 terawatt hours, compared to 3.8 terawatt hours in all of 2023.
According to the National Energy System Operator, these costs are on track to reach £6 billion by 2030 if nothing is done to improve the capacity of the electricity grid.
Andreas Jahn, an energy expert at the Regulatory Assistance Project, says this shortage is related to a lack of coordination between the four different national grid operators, in addition to local resistance to the construction of new poles.
These problems are made worse by the ‘feed-in’ of rooftop solar panels, which are not penalized when added to the already planned electricity network.
If these problems continue, it could mean that energy suppliers end up passing these rising costs on to consumers, leading to higher bills for everyone.