Germany's wind is in the north, its demand in the south
When the transmission grid between them is constrained, some northern wind has to be curtailed — turned down to keep the system stable — even though the whole country clears at a single wholesale price. This view shows the mismatch, the congestion, and what it means for pricing Germany as one bidding zone.
Sources: installed capacity from the Marktstammdatenregister (© Bundesnetzagentur); regional generation & load from SMARD; curtailment from netztransparenz; negative-price hours from ENTSO-E day-ahead prices. Pre-computed and static — no live backend.
Installed wind capacity by Landkreis (MaStR), with the largest plants and major demand centres. Capacity clusters in the windy north; demand sits in the southern and western cities.
This map shows installed capacity (MW), not energy produced. A high-capacity Landkreis still generates little on a calm or dark day. Capacity shows where the build-out happened; the time-series panels show what it does.
Demand centres are shown using population as a proxy; Germany doesn't publish electricity consumption at Landkreis resolution at this cadence. Read them as where people and activity are, not metered load.
Generation minus load per control area. 50Hertz and TenneT (north) run long; Amprion and TransnetBW (south and west) run short. When the corridor between them is full, the operator pays northern plants to turn down and southern ones to turn up — redispatch — and clean energy gets curtailed.
Net balance = generation − load per control area (SMARD), averaged over the last 12 months in Europe/Berlin local time. The north–south bottleneck is internal to the single DE-LU bidding zone, so it never appears in cross-border flows or zonal prices — redispatch/curtailment volume is the evidence. Curtailment is a regional volume from the German TSOs (netztransparenz), 1–3 day lag.
High-wind months bring both curtailment and negative prices — yet every region pays the same wholesale price, so the price alone doesn't signal that the south is short or the north is long.
wind long, would clear cheaper
demand heavy, would clear dearer
Germany and Luxembourg are a single bidding zone: one wholesale electricity price for the whole area, even when the grid physically can't move power from the windy north to the industrial south. When the link is full, cheap northern wind can't reach southern demand, so the operator pays some plants to turn down and others to turn up — redispatch — and the cost lands on consumers' grid fees.
Some economists argue this is the case for splitting Germany into smaller bidding zones, so prices would signal scarcity where the grid is constrained and pull investment to where it's needed. Others argue a single zone preserves price solidarity between regions, avoids structurally higher prices in the south, and keeps the market simpler and more liquid. Wattlas takes no side — it shows the physical mismatch the debate is about.
Curtailment here means renewable generation the grid couldn't absorb or transmit and that operators instructed to reduce to keep the system stable — a managed grid-stability measure, not energy discarded by choice. These are regional volumes reported by the German TSOs (netztransparenz) with a 1–3 day lag — a real, paid-for quantity, not an estimate, and not attributed to individual turbines.