For 50Hertz, a decisive decade of the energy transition is now beginning. We want to invest almost twice as much in the grid infrastructure by 2025 as we have in the past five years. In 2021 alone, investments of 860 million euros are planned, around 160 million euros more than in the previous year. The goal is to make transmission lines and substations fit to integrate more and more electricity from renewable energies safely and reliably into the overall system. Economically, 50Hertz is well equipped to tackle the tasks ahead. With a result according to IFRS of 193 million euros on sales from the grid business of around 1.45 billion euros, 2020 was an economically good year for 50Hertz (result 2019: 178 million euros). 50Hertz plans to invest a total of 4.7 billion euros in the grid infrastructure in the period from 2021 to 2025. (2016 to 2020: €2.9 billion) These funds will be used primarily for the expansion of new lines and the reinforcement of existing lines, as well as for the construction and upgrading of transformer stations.
62 percent of the annual electricity consumption in the 50Hertz grid area - in addition to the eastern German territorial states, this includes the city states of Hamburg and Berlin - was covered by solar, wind and biomass in 2020. This is a new record for the feed-in of green electricity in eastern Germany. The installed capacity of renewable energies rose from around 34 gigawatts (GW) in 2019 to around 36 GW in 2020. At the same time, there was less and less need to intervene in the operation of generation facilities. In this so-called congestion management (feed-in management of renewable energy plants and redispatch with conventional power plants), 50Hertz was able to reduce the volumes from around 2.5 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2019 to only 1.5 TWh (2020). The costs for these measures fell from 84 million euros (2019) to 33 million euros (2020). In 2015, these costs had still amounted to over 350 million euros.