German Economy Minister Habeck said at a consultation meeting on electricity market reform on February 20 that Germany will complete most of the work this year to make its electricity market more dependent on renewable energy supplies by the end of this decade. The German government has a goal of generating 80% of its electricity from wind and solar by 2030.
The Minister of Economy, whose full name is Robert Harbeck, said that Germany will complete most of the power market reforms this year, and greatly increase the proportion of renewable energy in the power structure before 2030.
As the largest economy in Europe, Germany is also the largest energy consumer in the region. Germany's goal of generating 80 percent of its electricity from wind and solar by 2030 has taken on added urgency as Germany cut imports of Russian fossil fuels last year.
"We will have done most of the necessary work in 2023," Harbeck told a consultation meeting on electricity market reform on Monday.
According to the data released last month, Germany will consume a total of 484.2 terawatt hours (Twh) of electricity in 2022, a year-on-year decrease of 4.0%; power generation will be 506.8 Twh, a year-on-year increase of 0.4%; renewable energy power generation will account for 48.3%. The value is 42.7%; among renewable energy power generation, land and offshore wind power accounted for 25.9%, photovoltaics accounted for 11.4%, biomass energy accounted for 8.2%, and hydropower and others accounted for 2.8%.
Germany’s Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) reported that the country added 350.4MW of new PV capacity in December, taking its total to 7.19GW in 2022.
Some 872MW of the new additions were subsidy-free PV installations built outside of German government incentive schemes, Bundesnetzagentur said. Another 2.42GW was deployed under the national tender scheme for utility-scale projects. At the end of December, Germany’s cumulative solar capacity exceeded 66.5GW.
Habeck said that as coal and nuclear power are phased out, the German government is preparing to tender natural gas power generation projects as a transition. He said the tenders would be ready this quarter and that natural gas would soon be replaced by zero-carbon alternatives such as hydrogen made from clean energy through electrolysis.
The challenge for the German government is that electricity demand will increase as electric vehicles and heat pumps become more common. Habeck said the German government's working assumption is that by 2030, national electricity consumption will reach 700-750 TWh.
Habeck noted that Germany's electricity reform plan will differ from other EU countries, which may have more stable electricity sources.
Germany established the goal of abandoning nuclear power in 2011. Although the German government extended the operation period of the only three remaining nuclear power plants to April this year due to the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Germany's goal of abandoning nuclear power has not changed.
By contrast, Germany's neighbor France relies heavily on nuclear power. France has the highest share of nuclear power generation in the world, which has stabilized at more than 70% in the 2010s.