Conventional power guarantees supply
1 Feb 2013
Matthias Hartung, CEO of RWE Generation highlights the essential role of conventional power plants in partnering renewable energy facilities – particularly when the weather is less than ideal:
On an hourly basis, power generation from renewable sources has frequently been below a thousand megawatts - a consequence of the inverse weather situation with hardly any wind and little or no sunshine.
Our conventional power plants are still able to reliably generate their full output of some 30,000 megawatts despite the snow and ice to supply electricity to industrial users and several million households in Germany.
Calm winds, snow and hazy weather conditions have come together at a time when the demand for electricity in Germany was particularly high.
On 16 January at 6pm, for example, a gentle wind with no sunshine meant that renewable energy sources were feeding around 800 MW into the grid - only slightly over 1 percent of it´s capacity installed in Germany.
Even around midday - and with the power supplied by photovoltaic installations - the volume of electricity generated from renewables was only marginally higher.
And on 22 January at 2 p.m., when electricity consumption in Germany was 84,000 megawatts, the wind and sun provided only 4,300 megawatts. This meant that the full output of the nuclear, lignite, hard coal and gas-fired power stations was needed. During the rest of the week, too, the situation did not change dramatically.
These figures highlight exactly how important conventional power plants are for ensuring a secure supply of electricity. Our plant staff are also able to cope with such extreme weather conditions. This shows once again how much we can depend upon conventional power plants.
It’s exactly at times like this that they shine as an important partner to renewable energies. The flexibility of the power plant portfolio also contributes to the stability of the grid when demand is low and the renewable power plants are feeding-in a large volume of electricity.
This was the case during the night of 24 December 2012. Wind energy then fed up to 19,300 MW into the grid, over 40 percent of demand - which was relatively low due to the public holiday and night-time hours.
During this period, the hard coal and gas-fired power plants were only called upon at minimum capacity to supply process heat to industrial users or balancing energy for grid stability.
The lignite-fired power stations’ output was reduced by up to 5,800 MW. Even the nuclear power plants cut down on their output temporarily. A similar situation is forecast for the next few days with mild weather and strong winds impacting the more than 18,000 MW of wind power in Germany.
Again the conventional power plant fleet will show its value by being on hand to react flexibly.
RWE Generation SE, the power generation company of the RWE Group, was launched on 1 January 2013. The company bundles the generating units of RWE Power in Germany, RWE Essent in the Netherlands and RWE npower in the UK. RWE Generation SE employs 18,000 people and has an electricity generating capacity of almost 50 gigawatts.
