Costs for balancing power shortages in the German power grid have significantly decreased.
According to calculations by the Federal Ministry of Economics, as reported by “Der Spiegel”, the costs for the previous year were around 1.7 billion euros. This is only slightly more than half of the previous year’s value of almost 3.3 billion euros.
The majority of the costs are accounted for by so-called Redispatch measures. Here, power plants are throttled back to prevent overloads in certain parts of the network, while other power plants are ramped up to maintain the overall stability of the network. The decline was attributed to the ministry, among other things, to the expansion and higher utilization of the networks, as well as a changed situation in the imports of electricity. Moreover, the fuel prices have fallen compared to the previous year, and there were hardly any extreme weather events.
A role may also have been played by the expansion of renewable energies, which, according to the Federal Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck (Greens), almost accounted for 60% of Germany’s power in 2024. As a result, price spikes in fossil energies have a lesser impact on the Redispatch costs. If the development continues, the power prices for end consumers could also decrease: The power grid operators directly pass the costs for the power shortage measures on to the usage fees.