The Electricity Generation Landscape of Bioenergy in Germany

Disaggregated data on electricity generation from bioenergy are very helpful for investigating the economic and technical effects of this form of renewable energy on the German power sector with a high temporal and spatial resolution. But the lack of high-resolution feed-in data for Germany makes it necessary to apply numerical simulations to determine the electricity generation from biomass power plants for a time period and geographic region of interest. This article presents how such a simulation model can be developed using public power plant data as well as open information from German TSOs as input data. The physical model is applied to an ensemble of 20,863 biomass power plants, most of which are in continuous operation, to simulate their electricity generation in Germany for the year 2020. For this period, the spatially aggregated simulation results correlate well with the official electricity feed-in from bioenergy. The disaggregated time series can be used to analyze the electricity generation at any spatial scale, as each power plant is simulated with its technical parameters and geographical location. Furthermore, this article introduces the electricity generation landscape of bioenergy as a high-resolution map and at the federal state level with meaningful energy figures, enabling comprehensive assessments of this form of renewable energy for different regions of Germany.