Electricity in Germany

The source is SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s electricity market data platform, which publishes the transmission operators’ reports within about an hour. Not all series arrive at the same time, so the interval shown is the most recent quarter-hour for which all generation types and the load are available (06:15), not the very latest timestamp. Solar, wind, hydro, biomass and “other renewables” (mainly geothermal plus landfill and sewage gas) count as renewable; pumped storage (storage, not primary energy) and “other conventional” (oil, coke-oven and blast-furnace gas, waste, among others) do not. Sources at exactly 0 MW are not shown. The bars above show two different physical quantities: power in GW on the left (how fast electricity is flowing right now), energy in GWh on the right (how much a battery holds). A GWh figure is therefore not “bigger” than a GW figure; they become comparable only through how long the batteries could bridge the current difference between generation and consumption (GWh ÷ GW). That difference is sometimes a surplus, sometimes a shortfall — the batteries could balance either, so its absolute value is used. It becomes very small at times during the day, so values above 99 h are shown as “> 99 h”. All bars are scaled with the load as 100%. The battery figures come from Battery-Charts (ISEA and PGS, RWTH Aachen University) and are based on the Bundesnetzagentur’s Marktstammdatenregister; as of 2026-10. They describe installed capacity, not the current state of charge: none of these sources publishes how much is actually available right now.Thought experiment: purely theoretical. The batteries charge whenever generation exceeds consumption and give the power back in the next quarter-hours with a shortfall until they are empty — forward in time only. The day shown is the most recent fully reported calendar day with a surplus, up to three weeks back. It assumes that all the battery capacity already installed and paid for in Germany is available, and empty at the start. In reality cars are on the road or not plugged in, batteries are never completely empty or full, some energy is lost in charging, and charging power is limited. Wind and solar sit on top in both charts because they vary with the weather and create the surplus; which power station “made” which electricity cannot be told apart in the grid. This thought experiment shows what is already there, and part of it could already be used today.

The forecasts are the four German transmission system operators’ own, published via the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform and republished by the Bundesnetzagentur on SMARD.de (CC BY 4.0); this site does not compute them. The next day’s forecast appears the day before, by 18:00 at the latest; until then the curve ends at midnight and the figures refer to today. Forecasts by source exist only for wind and solar, so hydro and biomass are missing, and the share of load is lower than the renewable share in the generation section, which is also a share of generation rather than of load. Actual output is reported about an hour late.

Shown are physical flows — the electricity actually moving over the lines — not the commercial trading schedules, which can differ. The source is SMARD, the Bundesnetzagentur’s electricity market data platform, which publishes the transmission operators’ reports within about an hour. The interval shown is the most recent quarter-hour for which all regularly reporting borders are in; a border that has not reported for hours appears as “—”. Norway and Sweden do not border Germany; they are connected by the NordLink and Baltic Cable subsea links and are therefore included.

Source: Verivox electricity price index, household with 4,000 kWh annual consumption. “When switching supplier” is the average of the tariffs new customers can currently sign up to; “average across all households” includes existing contracts and default supply, which are usually dearer. The difference between the two lines is what switching saves. The switching price is the monthly mean of a figure Verivox publishes daily; the current month is accordingly a mean of the days so far. The annual amount is rounded and applies to 4,000 kWh a year. The wholesale price in the next section is a different quantity and considerably lower, because it contains no grid fees, levies or taxes.

Figures in euros per megawatt-hour (€/MWh); 100 €/MWh is 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The values in the hourly chart are means of the four quarter-hour products: since the switch to quarter-hourly market time units, the exchange publishes 96 prices a day instead of 24. Negative prices are possible and real; they occur when a lot of wind and solar meets low demand. Gas prices, CO₂ certificates and grid fees are not part of this data source and are deliberately not shown here.

Source: Ember, Monthly Electricity Data, licence CC BY 4.0. The reference quantity is generation within the country; imports and exports are not taken into account, so a country that imports a lot of electricity does not necessarily consume power as renewable as its generation suggests. Hydro, wind, solar, bioenergy and other renewables count as renewable. The share is renewable generation divided by total generation over the whole period, so months with high output weigh more; for a single month it is exactly the figure Ember publishes. Twelve months rather than “year to date”, so that every season is included once and the countries stay comparable on any date. For Germany the period is July 2025 – June 2026. Ember publishes monthly data a few months behind, and not equally fast for every country; each country’s period is in its bar’s tooltip.