EffJot

The EnergyMap project of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sonnenenergie e.V. (German Society for Solar Energy) presents the data that is collected as a requirement of the Renewable Energy Act. Sadly, the site is in German only. I'll give some pointers and translations to the interesting areas.

The energy map (Energiekarte) shows the distribution of various kinds of renewable energy (erneuerbare Energien, abbrev. EE) production. Each coloured square shows the dominant kind in an area, colour saturation indicates the percentage of renewable energy in total consumption. Yellow is photovoltaics (Solarstrom), bright blue is wind power (Windkraft), dark blue is hydropower (Wasserkraft), green is biomass (Biomasse), light brown is sewage gas (Klärgas), dark brown is geothermal energy (Geothermie). In the right-hand column, the “energy regions” (districts, counties or municipalities, depending on scale) are displayed. Following those links you'll get detailed information on that region.

Those statistics show the percentage of renewable energy produced in relation to total consumption (% EEG-Strom) in the heading, followed by population (Einwohner) and average consumption (Stromverbrauch; based on population) on the top left and actual production on top right (MWh/Jahr: MWh/year; Anlagen: number of plants/sites/installations).

There's a box with a notice below, which basically tells you about some problems with the data. Mainly, data on old hydropower is not collected (so e.g. in Bavaria, ≈13 TWh are not accounted for), and some power companies provide poor data which may lead to wrong assignments to the administrative units.

Below, you'll find time-series for produced energy (Ausbau kWh), installed peak energy (Ausbau kW(peak)), growth kW(peak) per year (Zubau), number of plants/sites/installations (Stück). Then there's another notice on the problem that data is often not provided in time, affecting the statistics.

The last two diagrams show the distribution to various voltage grids (e.g. NS = Niederspannung: low voltage, 230V/400V; MS = Mittelspannung: medium voltage, 20kV) and distribution according to installation size (Verteilung nach Anlagengrößen).

For some examples, you can have a look at statistics for the whole of Germany. On the state level, Brandenburg has a very high percentage (48%), which quite surprised me: there's quite a lot of wind power around here, but I didn't estimate it being that much. On the municipality level, there's Cottbus in Brandenburg, southeast of Berlin, where I'm living, or the village I've grown up in, Obermaiselstein in south Bavaria.

They offer the data on these pages for download, so you can play with them yourself. The file format is called “CSV”, but is in fact its hideous German cousin “SSV” (semicolon separated values, with a decimal comma instead of decimal point). There's also a download page with the whole dataset and additional remarks on quality and validation. (Ask me if you need a translation.)