German state of Bavaria retires its last major coal plant

By Benjamin Wehrmann, Clean Energy Wire

The southern German state of Bavaria will retire its last major coal plant this week because the plant, in Zolling, near Munich, has been used less and less, even after the country completed its nuclear phase-out in 2023, public broadcaster BR reported.

With a capacity of 500MW, the plant will be taken off the grid on 21 February. The decision to retire the plant was made in 2022, after operator Onyx Power was awarded more than 46 million euros in an auction by the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) in return for transferring the Zolling plant into Germany’s reserve, where it will remain ready to be used as backup capacity if needed until 2031.

According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.

Germany’s total coal use in 2024 was at its lowest level in decades. BNetzA has ceased auctions for retiring coal plants early and will in the future mandate closures of the oldest plants without compensation. Germany plans to end coal-fired power production in 2038 at the very latest, with coal regions in eastern Germany so far remaining the only ones to rule out an earlier end date.

An analysis by BNetzA published in late 2024 showed that disruptions to electricity supply within the German network remained around the ten-year average in 2023, the year in which the country had to deal both with the fallout of the energy crisis and completed the nuclear phase-out.

• This article was first published by Clean Energy Wire here. It was republished under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .