Electricity production using coal in Germany overtook wind power again in the first quarter of 2021.
The Federal Statistical Office announced on Friday that a “low-wind spring” resulted in almost a third less electricity from wind power.
According to the Wiesbaden authority, the gap was filled by increasing electricity generation from coal and natural gas power plants.
A total of 138.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity were generated in this country from January through March and fed into the grid. According to preliminary results from the Federal Office, that was 2.6 percent less than in the first quarter of 2020. While the electricity in the same period last year came mainly from renewable energy sources such as wind power, biogas and sun (51.4 percent), coal, gas and nuclear energy dominated at the beginning of this year (59.3 percent).
With a share of 28.9 percent of the total amount of electricity fed into the grid, coal was the most important energy source for electricity generation in Germany in the first quarter of 2021. The amount of electricity generated in coal-fired power plants increased by more than a quarter (26.8 percent) compared to the same period in the previous year. to almost 40 billion kilowatt hours.
In the case of electricity from natural gas, it went up by 24 percent to 22.5 billion kilowatt hours.
In contrast, there was a strong minus of almost a third (32.4 percent) in wind power.
The feed-in of 33.5 billion kilowatt hours was the lowest value for this energy source for a first quarter since 2018. In the two previous years, wind power had achieved significantly higher values due to strong spring storms.