Solar power data for Austria

[HBmav3rik]

Hi there. I have some questions regarding the data for solar power in Austria.

According to your dashboard, solar power only accounts for ~3-4% of the energy production in Austria, while only utilizing ~13% of the installed power (Btw: you miss around 250MW of installed solar power - 2.5GW instead of 2.75GW). And that is on a good day.

I check the data on a daily basis and have never seen it go above 13-14% utilization. Are you sure your data is correct? I somehow cannot believe, especially during the very sunny period we have experienced the last couple of weeks, that like 85% of the installed solar panels just hang around idling.

BR

[VIKTORVAV99]

There are a few things to consider when looking at this number.

First of all solar panels can basically never produce 100% of their installed capacity at scale. A few individual panels or small installation might but not country wide so already there we have a solar loss vs installed capacity.

Secondly solar efficiency varries a lot by temperature, direction and inclination. Basically solar efficiency gets worse when it's warm and if it does not have a solar tracker it will only really have 1 optimal placement once per year, after that things start to drift.

And third but maybe most importantly when it comes to residential and commercial rooftop solar is self consumption. That means the building itself use the solar electricity produced and only sells the excess to the grid. And since Austria has net metering only the excess is counted by the electric utility and the TSO.

Obviously this don't exclude the fact that some solar can be missing but it's makes it significantly harder to verify and we rely on the TSOs to keep this information accurate.

[HBmav3rik]

Thanks for the quick response!

Yes, I am aware of the technical limitations of solar panels. What puzzels me is the %-age values of utilization, when for example compared to Germany (for example: yesterday Germany utilized 42% of it´s capacity, while Austria only utilized 13.8%)?

How is the metering different here? Does the german data show gross production, while the austrian shows net production ( = only excess that is fed into the grid)? And if so, isn´t this a little bit misleading in the end?

[VIKTORVAV99]

Thanks for the quick response!

Yes, I am aware of the technical limitations of solar panels. What puzzels me is the %-age values of utilization, when for example compared to Germany (for example: yesterday Germany utilized 42% of it´s capacity, while Austria only utilized 13.8%)?

How is the metering different here? Does the german data show gross production, while the austrian shows net production ( = only excess that is fed into the grid)? And if so, isn´t this a little bit misleading in the end?

Not sure if the metering is different but using % comparisons between countries is not recommended as this also depends on when the capacity was updated. (usually lagging between 1-2 years)

Germany also has way more large scale solar instalations that only feed into the grid and have almost zero self consumption.

[Kongkille]

I also think that this is interesting, however since our data source is ENTSOE for both production and capacity, I do not see any direct actions here.

If we have an alternative data source reporting different MW of solar we might be able to do more of an analysis to see if there would be any issues with the data but otherwise I am not sure.

[scriptator]

@HBmav3rik thx for bringing this up. I have exactly the same feeling that the Austrian solar production is greatly underestimated. I am following electricitymaps for years already and As far as I can remember, two or three years ago I sometimes saw solar production values around one GW. IMO it should not have gotten less since then except if there was an error in the data back then.

Is there a possibility to get a CSV with the Austrian hourly values of the last years so that I could try to prove that point? Or an API key

[VIKTORVAV99]

@HBmav3rik thx for bringing this up. I have exactly the same feeling that the Austrian solar production is greatly underestimated. I am following electricitymaps for years already and As far as I can remember, two or three years ago I sometimes saw solar production values around one GW. IMO it should not have gotten less since then except if there was an error in the data back then.

Is there a possibility to get a CSV with the Austrian hourly values of the last years so that I could try to prove that point? Or an API key

Since Electricity Maps use the data provided by ENTSO-E all data is available on the transparancy platform.

Contact ENTSO-E directly if you wish to get a API key, there are instructions on how to do it here: Getting API Tokens

[scriptator]

Thx for the hint. For now I only analyzed on https://www.energy-charts.info (which uses data from ENTSO-E) that the maximum of solar power input into the grid at any point in time during a year rose much less than the installed capacity.

Changes 2015 -> 2021 Installed capacity [1]: 937 MWP --> 2783 MWP (+197%) Peak solar power [2]: 513 MW --> 676 MW (+ 32%)

One caveat: the production values reported by ENTSO-E only show (an estimate of) the solar power which is inserted into the grid and not the actual production, as stated by the operator of the Austrian grid APG [3]. That means that self-consumption of PV electricity is not contained in the data. However, it does not seem plausible to me that almost 100% of the newly installed PV capacity since 2015 is self-consumed and not inserted at least to a significant percentage into the APG grid.

So in total I can only conclude that there is something wrong with the reported numbers. I suspect that they changed the model that calculates the solar power at some point in time and it now reports too low values. Any different views on that matter?

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/807265/umfrage/installierte-photovoltaik-leistung-in-oesterreich/ [2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=AT [3] https://markttransparenz.apg.at/de/markt/Markttransparenz/erzeugung/Erzeugung%20pro%20Typ