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The following plots can be obtained from energy-charts.info and selecting the country. Note that this is electricity production, not total energy.

Switzerland

Switzerland's electricity production is CO2 free echarts-ch-w23-2022

Observations

  • The load peaks around lunch are relatively narrow (compared to Germany and the EU, below)

  • Peak capacity can be met easily.

  • No intention to meet the low-level load requirements?

Germany

Germany relies heavily on CO2 emitting energy sources (brown coal, coal, fossil gas) echarts-de-w23-2022

Observations

  • For the current level of energy storage there is already too much solar power installed in Germany (note that the public solar power generation is less than the total shown here. Electricity generation at lunch exceeds the requirements, but only at lunch. It does not extend sufficiently into the morning and afternoon. This can be taken as an argument that more solar power installations would help in those hours. However, more energy storage capacity (batteries, pumped hydro, etc) would be even better.

  • Solar power is quite reliable, when looking at all of Germany (around lunch). Wind power is completely dominated by on-shore and shows very substantial variations on a weekly (daily) basis.

  • The amount of CO2 emitting energy sources is quite striking.

The EU

echarts-eu-w23-2022

Observations

  • The relative importance of nuclear power is substantially increased compared to Germany.

  • As in Germany, fossil gas enables the increased power needs for industry and for much of the daily variation.

The US

For comparison the data from the US, obtained from https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor echarts-eu-w23-2022

Observations

  • Much less solar and wind, in relative terms

  • About the same maximum-to-minimum variation as in the EU, i.e. the peak load is about 50% higher than the minimum load.

  • Mostly gas and some coal are used to compensate the load variability and the solar time variability.