In Central Europe, Germany’s Renewable Revolution Causes Friction
The country’s surplus power, a byproduct of its shift to green energy, is spilling over into Poland and Czech Republic, straining their electrical grids
BERLIN—A battle is raging in Central Europe over the balance of power—the electrical kind.
Poland and the Czech Republic see Germany as an aggressor, overproducing electricity and dumping it across the border. Germany sees itself as a green-energy pioneer under unfair attacks from less innovative neighbors.
As part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Energiewende , or energy revolution, Germany will shut its nuclear power plants by 2022 and replace them with its rapidly expanding wind and solar power.
But the volatile renewables don’t always perform, and the Germans are also relying on coal- and gas-powered plants to keep the lights on.
That creates problems on windy and sunny days when Germany produces far more electricity than it needs. Excess power spills over the border into Polish and Czech territory, threatening their electrical grids with collapse, companies and governments there say.
It is “collateral damage of a purely political decision of the German government,” said Barbora Peterova, the spokeswoman for CEPS A.S., the Czech national grid. There has been “no consultation and no discussion about the impact.”
German companies don’t deny that erratic power flows are a problem, but they argue that overloads are largely due to outdated grids on both sides of the border.
“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” said Gert Schwarzbach, the head of interconnectors at 50Hertz Transmission GmbH, a grid operator responsible for power lines that cross into Poland and the Czech Republic in northeastern Germany.
But the problem has been aggravated by Germany’s decadelong struggle to build high-voltage power lines that can carry energy from windmills in its gale-battered north to its industrial power gluttons in the south. That delay has forced it to use its neighbors’ grids to shuttle power southward, putting their local networks under heavy stress and at risk of blackouts.
“It has clogged all of the interconnections,” said Grzegorz Wilinski, a senior official at the Polish Electricity Association and deputy director of strategy at Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA, Poland’s biggest energy company.
To bear the weight of German power, Prague and Warsaw are now investing millions in higher voltage wires and installing transformers at the border to redirect the power back to German turf.
CEPS and Polish grid-operator Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne SA have spent about €115 million ($122 million) for the massive transformers, known as phase-shifters. Poland has invested $300 million last year to update its grid and substations, according to a spokeswoman for the country’s national grid.
German grid operators aren’t standing still. 50Hertz is adding its own transformers in two locations on the German side of the border to help tame the overflow. But the installation of one transformer has been delayed by three years and costs have ballooned to about €100 million because of a court case, according to 50Hertz’s Mr. Schwarzbach.
“It’s clear that rebuilding our energy supply is a long-term process where further steps are needed,” said a spokeswoman for Germany’s economics ministry.
Meanwhile, Czech and Polish customers have been left covering the costs. The fallout has become acute for Polish and Czech coal power companies. Because the grids are clogged up by German electricity, the companies’ ability to trade the power they produce has been impaired, in the same way that a congested tunnel prevents more cars from entering.
Vladimir Budinsky, head of foreign affairs at a mining subsidiary of CEZ Group, the Czech Republic’s biggest power company, said the group can’t trade electricity across its border to Poland, where megawatt-hours are €6 more expensive, because there is no space on the grid.
“At this moment there is no capacity,” he said. “We can’t do this business.”
Polish power plants, according to Mr. Wilinski, are now burning four million tons less coal a year—the equivalent of closing one large power station—than they did before 2008 when Germany’s wind and solar capacity began to surge.
The Polish government has sought compensation from Germany during discussions over the past seven years, but it has struggled to demonstrate that German grid activity is causing the congestion, according to Waldemar Lagoda, head of international communication in the energy department at Poland’s economics ministry.
“Portions of electricity are not marked [in the grid] so that phenomenon was not so easy to prove,” he said.
And for companies, the cost of resolving grid imbalances has to be split in half between the two parties involved, under European Union rules. When it comes to the bigger damages like lost business or equipment upgrades, “that’s just part of the business,” said Mr. Wilinski.
Andreas Jahn, a senior researcher at the Regulatory Assistance Project in Berlin, said that until Germany can finish outfitting its own network of power lines, its neighbors have few choices but to cope with the whims of Germany’s energy revolution.
“The only other option left,” he said, “would be to close the border.”