What is ghost power?
Germany is still the European leader when it comes to renewable energy production. Installations of solar and wind parks are increasing, and the renewable energy targets for 2050 could be met. Vast amounts of electricity are being generated but it isn’t all being used. The term ‘ghost power’ has been used in the industry for many years. The grid operators have a better term for it, it is known as “feed-in management”, technically, it is the forced shutdown of the feed-in supply of electricity from renewable energies. This occurs when individual sections of a transmission grid are overloaded and can no longer transport electricity.
To be more precise, wind turbines and solar inverters are shut down and the energy that is not produced is known as “outage energy”.
As energy producers must be paid, the plant operators receive financial compensation for their “outage work”, i.e. the amount of energy they are told not to produce. This is the same amount they would have received during normal grid operation. As a result, money is flowing in Germany even though no electricity is being collected. “Ghost power” sums up this situation perfectly.
The amount of “ghost power” has risen dramatically in the last 5 years. In 2022 alone, a good three billion kilowatt hours of renewable power that could have been produced was not used according to an estimate from the German Association of Energy and Water Industries. At 4 cents per kilowatt hour (end user price as of December 2023), the Germans are paying a lot of money to cover electricity costs and the costs for the outage energy payments.
Ironically, ghost energy could be used for other resources. Green hydrogen could be produced from the curtailed electricity to heat around 100,000 households for a year. A hydrogen law is a step forward to regulate how much surplus energy can be used for hydrogen production. Alternatively, more focus should be put on better facilities to handle the amount of energy produced.