Renewables provide 46.9% of power used in Germany in 2022

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Renewable energy accounted for 46.9% of German power consumption 2022, up 4.9 percentage points from a year earlier thanks to favourable weather conditions, industry groups said on Friday.

Both higher sunshine intensity and wind speeds were behind the trend, utility industry association BDEW and the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW) said in a statement.

The preliminary figures were calculated under European Union requirements that base market share of individual electricity sources on usage rather than production, a basis also adopted by Berlin for its climate target definitions, they said.

The share of renewables in German power consumption in 2021 had been 42.0%.

Germany's power consumption overall declined by 3.1% year-on-year to 546.5 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2022.

Domestic electricity production, meanwhile, fell 1.9% to 574.0 billion kWh, the data showed.

Renewable generation, which along with wind includes solar, hydro, biomass, waste and geothermal energy, contributed 256.2 billion kWh, or 44.6%, to the production total.

Renewable production increased by 8.1% in volume from a year earlier and from a share of 40.5% of the total.

The renewable category included onshore wind, at 99.0 billion kWh, up 9.3%, photovoltaic at 62.3 billion, up 21.2%, biomass at 46.8 billion, up 2.9%, and offshore wind at 25.0 billion, up 2.6%, among others.

The conventional electricity production, which made up the remainder of the total, came from nuclear fuel, coal and natural gas.

Germany's power production from renewable energy is still a long way from reaching a target of 80% of total electricity by 2030, Environment Agency UBA noted on Monday.

(Reporting by Vera Eckert, editing by Jonathan Oatis)