Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)

Assembled from 24 blocks · 1 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. The German term, now used across European power markets, for a period of simultaneously low wind and low solar output across a wide area — typically a winter high-pressure system sitting over north-western Europe with fog or heavy overcast and light winds, lasting from a day to well over a week. It is the specific meteorological event that defines the hard edge of a wind-and-solar system, for three reasons. It is regional, so interconnection with neighbours who are inside the same weather system does not help. It is seasonal, arriving when heating demand is highest and solar resource is lowest. And it is long relative to storage, so a fleet of two-to-four-hour batteries discharges once and is then a spectator. European markets have repeatedly priced these events at extreme levels — German day-ahead prices during the December 2024 episodes rose above nine hundred euros per megawatt-hour in the peak hours, an order of magnitude above the typical clearing price — while gas, coal, hydro, imports and demand response supplied what wind and solar did not. Dunkelflaute is not an argument against wind and solar; it is an argument about what else a wind-and-solar system must keep, and about how that residual capacity is paid for when it runs for a few hundred hours a year.
3. Knowledge
4. Variability and intermittency in generation
5. Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)
6. Transmission and grid interconnection
7. Connections
8. Lithium-ion battery storage
9. Variability and intermittency in generation
10. Transmission and grid interconnection
11. German power prices spike during a December Dunkelflaute
12. Lithium-ion battery storage
13. Nuclear fission power
14. The duck curve
15. Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)
16. Transmission and grid interconnection
17. German power prices spike during a December Dunkelflaute
18. Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)
19. Variability and intermittency in generation
20. Copper
21. Changji–Guquan ±1100 kV UHVDC link
22. The Changji–Guquan ultra-high-voltage link is commissioned
23. Evidence
24. The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.