Spatiotemporal Modeling of the Electricity Production from Variable Renewable Energies in Germany

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.

Comparison of Energy Production Between Fixed-Mount and Tracking Systems of Solar PV Systems in Jakarta, Indonesia

“…The second step is to calculate the electricity generated by each photovoltaic panel, taking into account the date of (de)commissioning. The resulting time series for the ensemble is then converted into local time and spatially aggregated and stored in CSV format (Lehneis et al, 2022).…”

Temporally and Spatially Resolved Simulation of the Wind Power Generation in Germany

“…Energies 2023, 16, x FOR PEER REVIEW 2 of 16 spatial resolution for Germany [5,6], but do not yet contain data from offshore turbines. Offshore wind energy has been strongly expanded in recent years, and is now an important factor for the German electricity supply [7].…”

“…The time series, obtained by two web requests for a given time period and plant location, provide the following data for the wind power model: date and time in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), air density at ground level, and wind speed at 50 m above the ground. Since the retrieved weather information is available for both onshore and offshore turbine sites, which is not the case for the weather product employed in our previous wind power simulations [6,12], the MERRA-2 weather data via the renewables.ninja web tool were used for all numerical simulations in this study. In addition, the simulations can now be performed for each country or offshore region in Europe using the same reanalysis product.…”

“…The values in this table have been shown in previous simulations to be realistic averages for turbine ensembles. In addition, the values listed for onshore turbines have already been used in peer-reviewed energy studies [6,12]. Furthermore, the results obtained from the wind power model have to be compared with measurements on real power systems to validate the simulations and to assess their accuracy.…”

“…National energy studies often include wind power generation using high spatial but low temporal resolutions, as in many different analyses of the German electricity sector [3,4]. There are also wind power simulations that already deliver a high temporal and spatial resolution for Germany [5,6], but do not yet contain data from offshore turbines.…”