Germany's Grid: Renewables-Rich and Rock-Solid

Last Friday Germany’s grid regulator released the 2013 data for grid reliability, and the figures have renewable energy advocates crowing.  The latest numbers (released in German) reveal no sign of growing instability despite record levels of renewable energy on the grid — 28.5 percent of the power supplied in the first half of 2014.  In fact, Germany's grid is one of the world's most reliable.

According to the Bundesnetzagentur, unplanned outages left the average German consumer without electricity for 15.32 minutes in 2013, down from 15.91 minutes in 2012 and 21.53 minutes in 2006.  The performance, using the power industry's System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), affirms Germany's place in the top five for grid reliability for European countries.

German grid reliability, meanwhile, far outstrips the best SAIDI results delivered by U.S. and Canadian utilities.  The top quartile of SAIDI results captured by last year's North American reliability benchmarking exercise by the IEEE Power & Energy Society, for example, had consumers without power for an average of 93 minutes — six times longer than outages experienced by the average German consumer.

What makes Germany's grid reliability notable is the repeated insistence by critics of renewable energy that blackout risk is rising under the German Energiewende or 'energy transition'.  As Craig Morris, lead author of the Berlin-based German Energy Transition, writes this week:  "The news may come as a surprise to international critics of the Energiewende."

Germany's Grid:  Renewables-Rich and Rock-Solid