
Paid. Curtailed. Forgotten.
·1121 words·6 mins
In 2023, Germany paid for 34 terawatt-hours of electricity that never flowed. Simultaneously, power plants elsewhere were ramped up that weren’t needed. This is called redispatch. It cost 3.1 billion euros. Who pays: the grid user, via network charges. When the lines come that would structurally solve the problem: 2028 — and even then only partially.