From KlimaNachrichten
By Frank Bosse
“Too much electricity is also a danger”
With this headline, “n-tv” surprised its readers on the morning of Whit Sunday.
Attentive readers of the “Climate News” already knew it beforehand: The Whitsun weekend is a stress test for our power grid: The sun is very high, provides a lot of energy and the demand for electricity is very low due to the holiday. Back in May 2025, you could read here:
“The Pentecost weekend is not far away, you should hope for clouds.”
n-tv asked the head of the transmission system operator “TransnetBW”, Werner Götz, about the problems. His answers are interesting and disturbing at the same time.
“As a grid operator, we have to balance consumption and supply every second. This is not easy with this volatility. Consumers probably also want a more even distribution.”
In any case, the interview at n.tv with Werner Götz is a reading recommendation.
What did it look like on Pentecost Sunday? A look at the shares in production:
Up to 74% of the power generated was provided by renewable energies (RE, wind + PV).
This also implies the use of power electronics to generate the 50Hz alternating current “set in stone” in the European grid. The risks here became visible during the “Iberout”, we reported in detail, including here.
At the end of April, however, only about 65% RE was ultimately the cause of the blackout on the Iberian Peninsula.
In addition, an unknown proportion of photovoltaics (PV) cannot be centrally controlled, that was once the intention. Perhaps the old saying: “Small animals make crap out of dung” had simply been ignored. Hundreds of thousands of rooftop solar systems add up to a huge generator.
Unfortunately, they almost all deliver at the same time and controllability was dispensed with at the time. Cheap Chinese imports contribute to the situation that about 35 GW of capacity is unmanageable. An article on this blog from January 2025 explains the numbers.
In the meantime, the numbers are likely to have risen further.
The main thing is a lot, this is called “barrel ideology” in planned economies like in the GDR. The main thing was a lot of kWh of generation, they hardly thought about sense and nonsense.
Nor about the “negative prices” that occur on broad days, in truth this is a levy so that an oversupply can be disposed of in neighboring countries. There are no negative prices in functional markets. A producer would simply stop producing if he had to add money to the products. It’s different with electricity.
On Whit Sunday, this added up to around 1.8 million euros between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., the data comes from “Agora.” Without this “export”, the share of RE would have been over 85% at its peak. That would hardly have been controllable in terms of rules.
It could have been even worse, as we know after the “Iberout” at the latest.
Why didn’t it happen that way? Fortunate circumstances, as a look at “Kachelmannwetter” shows:
At the maximum of electricity generation from PV, the sky was heavily overcast in large parts of Germany.
The wind blew quite strongly, especially in the afternoon. Then cloudless skies: That could have been really eye-catching!
All experts should have their hair standing on end. And what was given to us as a goal? Climate protection! This can never have been real, even on Whit Sunday Germany produced an average of 151 g CO2/kWh. That is about a factor of 8 of what France is doing in this respect.
The “energy transition” also ensures that we are one of the few “dirty children” in Europe when it comes to CO2 emissions from electricity production.
When will there be an end to “barrel ideology” in a new guise? Does it have to “bang” in the power grid when pious wishes like ours in May for clouds at Pentecost are drowned out in the noise of the weather?
Each reader can answer this question for himself.
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