Power Generation Pattern in 2037

Operating a system based on renewables with very high installed of wind and solar power will lead to unprecedented challenges. There will be days when there is a surplus of renewable generation compared to load, and days when there is not closely enough renewable generation to cover the load. In addition we will see extreme rates of change in the generation. This is not news, after an introduction of the topic in my last article I will now start to quantify what we might expect and visualize the numbers.

I would like to introduce a simple way how future power generation patterns can be estimated. I take a few sunny days in Germany from 2021 and download the production data from smard.de:

We know (also from smard.de) that the installed Solar PV capacity in Germany today wass about 53 GW at that time. A German policy scenario says that solar PV might be 345 GW in 2037 (see Scenarios). This will be 6.5 times the installed capacity we had in 2021. If I multiply the solar PV generation curve from 2021 by 6.5, I should have a good estimate of the solar PV generation pattern in 2037 – please note that I used in both graphs the same scale:

Just for comparison: Today's peak load in Germany is a about 85 GW.

Of course, it is not really precise, as the real generation depends on location, technology and many other things. But it will not be far off. It is a simple, fast and transparent way of making a prediction – knowing that many things will change in the years to come.

We can do it similarly with wind onshore and wind offshore generation and also with the load. The load is the most tricky one as we do not take any “smart” power use into account – that we will do in later steps. Here are the numbers for the generation increase in the Policy Scenario 2037:

If we multiply offshore wind, onshore wind and solar PV for 8 August 2021 by the factor for capacity increase shown in the above table and double the load (red line) the curves will look like this:

The change is significant. Today the peak load is a about 85 GW, and the generation will be about 240 GW at its peak: almost three times today's peak load. It looks like simple numbers. In practice, this means that the way we operate a system in the future will have to be quite different to the way we operate it today!

More analysis to come.

Personal Note: Those curves look hard to believe. At the same time, we are taking big steps in this direction. First jump, then think? No, I see it as one of the biggest challenges in engineering we are working on. We are redesigning a complex system, not just individual devices. And it does not stop at engineering: politics and society have to support every step as well.