© BMWi, Data from Working group on renewable energy statistics (information current as of August 2016).

Last year in Germany, renewables installations including wind turbines, solar rooftop installations generated around 187 billion kilowatt hours’ worth of electricity. That’s about 30 per cent of our gross electricity generation. and it compares to 25.8 per cent in 2014. The Working Group on Renewable Energy Statistics has just released its provisional figures for 2015. So what can these numbers tell us?

Candle (power) in the wind

At 70,922 GWh, on-shore wind power was our largest renewable source of energy last year. This figure corresponds to 37.9 per cent of all renewable energy generated in Germany.

The share of offshore wind power may look rather small at 4.4 per cent, but it has grown exponentially – in fact, our offshore capacity grew almost six fold between 2014 and 2015, from 1,471 GWh to around 8,284 GWh.

(Power from) the sun also rises

The share of solar power in our energy system is also growing. Last year, Germany’s solar installations generated a total of 38,737 GWh of electricity, which compares to 36,056 GWh in the preceding year.

Biomass and hydropower are also valuable building blocks of our energy system. Their respective shares, however, stagnated or even shrank a little. This means that solar and wind power have emerged as the most important sources of renewable energy for our energy transition.