Germany is moving to cleaner energy and its power landscape is evolving fast. The goal is for 35 percent of electricity to be produced from renewables by 2020, rising to more than 80 percent by 2050. More and more power generators are entering the market, including wind farms, biomass plants and photovoltaic arrays. This is leading to distributed and fragmented patterns of generation, with fluctuating feed-in volumes. Entirely new centres of sustainable electricity production – such as in coastal areas – are emerging, while the number of conventional power plants is dwindling.
The distances between these new centres of generation and the primary points of consumption are growing. To transmit electricity from the wind farms of Northern to Southern Germany, and distribute it Europe-wide, we are expanding and upgrading the grid infrastructure. For example, with the help of the SuedLink and ULTRANET projects.