Seasonal and Weather Influences in the Outages of German Thermal Generators

Understanding when and why outages occur is crucial to maintaining a reliable electricity supply. As weather variability and renewables cause load fluctuations to increase, it becomes important to carefully assess the availability of thermal generation. In Europe, existing data on outages of power generation units are not ready-to-use, hindering research. I address this gap by cleaning and processing Urgent Market Messages (UMMs) for German power units from the EEX and ENTSO-E Transparency platforms. The final dataset contains time series of hourly available capacity for a 10-year period (2015–2024). The computed available capacity is validated using a sample of coal and gas units. Finally, the impact of load, weather, and seasonality on the availability of generation units is explored through an explainable model.