All about Renewable Energy

Visitors entering the trading floor of Next Kraftwerke perceive much more monitors than people. At least four, sometimes eight monitors are grouped around each workplace. Traders watch the activities on the screens with full concentration: energy market prices, load and generation profiles, market information, weather reports, and plant schedules. The job is to keep an eye on, prioritize and evaluate a wide range of information. The acquired knowledge largely determines the traders' activities on the European power exchanges.

In the energy sector, the term “curtailment” refers to the reduction of power production (“generation curtailment”) or – less frequently - power consumption (“load curtailment”) when there is too much electricity in the grid (generation curtailment) or when there is not enough power in the grid (load curtailment). Curtailment aims at lessening the stress on the grid at a given moment of the day. Most commonly, curtailment is associated with the reduction of infeed from renewable energy sources.

Day-ahead trading of electricity refers to the buying and selling of electricity on the day before the actual production and delivery. Day-ahead trading either takes place on the spot market of the respective power exchange (often called day ahead market or day ahead auction) or through bilateral contracts between two parties - usually power trading companies - outside of the power exchange in over the counter (OTC) deals.

For several months, the German power exchange prices have been moving in only one direction: straight up. In an interview with our electricity trader Jan Egidi, we take a closer look at this development and talk about the implications of this trend for the German renewables industry.

Wed., April 29 2020, 9:30 a.m. (UTC+2)

Higher shares of renewables in electricity mix require perfect coordination of their energy generation to provide a cost-efficient and secure electricity supply and guarantee a stable grid. Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) allow to aggregate thousands of electricity producers, consumers and storage units and to control them according to signals from the wholesale market and system operators. 

Wed., May 26 2021, 1 p.m. (CET)

In Greece, the role of the RES Aggregator (FoSe) has been recently established, which will take over the trading of RES in the future. Therefore, Next Kraftwerke, one of the largest Aggregators in Europe, brings together experts from Greek utilities, aggregators and institutions to discuss opportunities and challenges for the Greek RES aggregator market in a webinar format. 

Hendrik Sämisch and Jochen Schwill, founders and CEOs of Next Kraftwerke, on the partnership with Shell Renewables & Energy Solutions

Since the beginning of the corona crisis, negative power prices have become quite common for electricity traders: In this blog, we explain how negative electricity prices develop and what is positive about them.

The opinion persists that too many renewable energies in the energy mix would endanger the security of supply. Although there are currently still challenges that renewables cannot (yet) solve entirely on their own – keyword dark doldrums – the trend of the last few years shows that the security of supply in Germany has not declined, despite an increasing share of distributed renewable and volatile electricity producers. On the contrary, it has even increased. The Federal Network Agency publishes the SAIDI, which is the System Average Interruption Duration Index that documents the energy supply disruptions of a year and in which the cause of these disruptions is also identified – showing the increase in security of supply despite a simultaneous increase in renewable energies.

For weeks now, Germany and its European neighbors have had a peak season for wind power. The winter storms Sabine (also known as Ciara or Elsa), Victoria (known as Dennis in UK) and Yulia brought new records – most recently the unprecedented peak value of 46.2 gigawatts (GW). Renewables accounted for 69 percent of net electricity production in the third week of February, with wind accounting for 55 percent. Never before has so much wind power been fed into the German power grid. Are these figures the result of extreme weather conditions, which simply brought us an extraordinary number of storms this winter, or is there a general trend here? And how does the German energy system actually cope with these record values?