The average wholesale electricity price in the day-ahead market last year was €78.51/MWh, down around 17.5 percent on 2023. In France and Denmark, average wholesale electricity prices were €58.02/MWh (France) and €70.75/MWh (Denmark), and thus below German wholesale prices. Germany imported a total of 67.0 TWh of electricity, an increase of 23.2 percent. The main supplier was France.

Exports of electricity from Germany fell by 10.1 percent to 35.1 TWh in 2024. The largest customers were Austria with 9.2 TWh (2023: 8.5 TWh) and Poland.

Onshore wind energy remains the driving force behind the expansion of renewable energies. Onshore wind energy accounted for around 25.9 percent of total generation. The largest increase was recorded by photovoltaics, with a total of 63.3 TWh (2024). In 2023, 55.7 TWh was fed in from solar energy.

In our graphic, we have compared the data currently published by SMART for 2024 with the data for total generation in 2021, a year in which nuclear power still accounted for more than 10 percent of total energy generation in Germany and the share of electricity generation from fossil fuels was still more than 57 percent.

Between 2021 and today (2024), Germany phased out nuclear power. 2022 was the last year in which the last reactors still supplied electricity as planned and accounted for around 6.7 percent of total energy production. In 2023, the share was still around 1.5 percent until the final shutdown of all reactors in April of that year. Thus, 2024 was the first year in Germany without any energy generation from nuclear power. Three years ago, the share was still 12.9 percent.

At the same time, the share of natural gas and lignite in total energy production was also reduced by around 3 percent each. Hard coal by 4 percent. Offshore wind energy did not achieve any significant growth. Its share in 2024 was 6 percent. Biomass remained almost at the 2021 level, rising by only 0.5 percent.

Electricity consumption (grid load, excluding private consumption by private systems) in Germany rose by 1.3 percent year-on-year to 464.4 TWh in 2024. Three years ago, in 2021, it was still 504.5 TWh, or around 8 percent more.

The further development of the electricity market in Germany remains exciting, also in view of the new elections at the end of February 2025. It also remains to be seen what influence the construction of large-scale battery storage systems will have and how the hunger of the large-scale data storage required in the context of digitalization and the AI age can be satisfied