Electricity industry
As electricity industry , including electricity (, supplies,) - or current (, supplies,) economic , industry and geography, or -sector which is industry refers to the electricity supply ( NACE -sector 351), thus the supply of consumers with electrical energy (commonly known as "electricity" or "current").
The sector includes all stages of electricity supply from generation and feed-in through trading, transport and distribution to the end consumer. The border areas to neighboring sectors are services in connection with the supply of electricity and the manufacture of machines, devices and systems used for supplying electricity.
The sector includes, in particular, the operators of all types of power plants, electricity trading companies , transmission and distribution network operators , as well as the largest group in terms of numbers, the local, regional and nationally integrated electricity supply companies . Since the electricity supply as part of the basic supply is subject to public control and special requirements in many countries, at least the distribution to the end consumer is often taken over by companies that are wholly or partially publicly owned ( municipal utilities , etc.). The end consumer is free to change the electricity provider .
The electricity industry, which is assigned to the secondary sector (industry), is horizontally closely interlinked with the other sub-sectors of the supply and disposal industry, in particular the network-based supply of long-distance gas , district heating and water . On the other hand, there is often a vertical integration with mining , which is responsible for the extraction of energy resources ( fossil fuels , uranium ).
history
Beginnings
In the early days of electrical industrialization , which began in Europe and the USA in the 1880s, a large number of small island grids emerged , each of which was fed by a single power station (“control center”). As a rule, these first power stations were built by railway companies to operate electric railways, especially trams , or by electricity-intensive industrial companies (often coal mines ) that operated many electrical machines, primarily for self-sufficiency.
The expansion of the early island networks was also technically limited by the fact that direct current was often used , so that no transformation for low-loss transmission over longer distances was possible. The output of the power plants was initially in the range of a few hundred kilowatts, but gradually increased into the megawatt range. The power plants were mostly hydro or coal-fired power plants (initially mostly with piston steam engines ), the locations of which were dictated by the existence of a river or a cheap coal supply (proximity to a coal mine, port or rail connection).
It was not until around 1900, with increasing electrification , that the need gradually arose to connect electrical street lighting, later also small businesses and ultimately private households, to the supply network and to expand the networks in the larger towns. For this purpose, the larger cities founded public electricity plants ( Stadtwerke ), which operated their own power plants and built a network. Smaller cities, on the other hand, for which it was not worthwhile to operate their own power plant or which could not raise the necessary capital for this, often cooperated with a local power plant operator. For this purpose, the operator of the power plant usually concluded a concession agreement with the municipality to be supplied, which guaranteed the operator the exclusive right to set up an electrical network in the area and to connect and supply the end consumers in the area. This gave the operator the assurance that the high costs incurred for setting up the network would be covered. In return for the granting of the network monopoly, the municipality often received a share of ownership in the operating company, so that the municipality shared in the profits. Or the network monopoly remained with the municipality and the power plant operator received a minority stake (often 49%) in the municipal utilities. Municipal utilities and private power plant and network operators were closely linked through mutual holdings.
Parallel to the electricity industry, a similar structure developed in the gas and drinking water industry. Often the utilities were integrated horizontally .
Creation of regional suppliers (overland plants)
With the growing expansion of urban networks and advancing electrification in rural regions, the need arose around 1910 to connect the local networks and create a comprehensive supply. This task was taken over by so-called overland plants , which, based on powerful power plants (overland centers), set up a regional alternating current network, to which the networks of the municipal utilities were connected. Because of the large capital requirement on the one hand and the monopoly on the other hand, both private financiers and the public sector , in particular the districts and municipalities of the supply area, were usually involved in the overland works . Today's regional suppliers emerged from the overland plants .
It quickly became apparent that the power plant and network operation in the intercity network was technically and economically superior. As a result, many municipal utilities gave up operating their own power plants and only had their networks supplied by the overland plants. There was also a concentration among the power plant operators; many smaller power plant companies were taken over by the financially strong overland plants and connected to the regional network.
Creation of the network economy
After the First World War , in the 1920s, a third level emerged above the city and overland works, which linked the overland networks in a nationwide high-voltage network. For this purpose, many countries founded their own association companies for the purpose of cooperation in the association economy . In Germany, for example, these were the electrical works owned by the German Reich , the Bayernwerk in the Free State of Bavaria , the Preußische Elektrizitäts AG in the Free State of Prussia , the Badische Landes-Elektrizitäts -orgungs AG in the state of Baden , the United Electricity Works Westphalia in the Province of Westphalia .
As before with the overland plants, there was also a concentration in which the powerful network companies took over regional suppliers and integrated their power plant capacity into their network. Ultimately, the regional suppliers only played the role of an intermediate distributor; the generation was largely in the large power plants of the network companies.
After the network companies in Germany had initially competed, they demarcated their supply areas in the late 1920s in demarcation agreements ("electrical peace"). At the state level, the monopoly structure that arose with the strong participation of the public sector was secured in 1935 by the Energy Industry Act (EWG). The three-level structure with regional monopolies remained in West Germany beyond the end of the German Empire. The EEC and the demarcation treaties also retained their validity in the Federal Republic of Germany; In the 1957 law against restraints of competition , the territorial protection agreements were expressly exempted from the prohibition of cartels .
Liberalization and unbundling
The cartel structure described above remained in place in Germany and many other European countries until in 1996 the EU countries agreed on the liberalization and unbundling of the energy markets in Europe , based on EEC regulation No. 17/62 for competition law .
The European standard was first implemented in national law in Germany in 1998 through an amendment to the Competition Act , which, as the most serious change, repealed the demarcation agreements. The affiliated companies thus entered into competition with one another and had to allow one another to pass through their transmission and distribution networks. At about the same time, the creation of electricity exchanges created an electricity trading market and new electricity providers emerged who mainly acted as pure traders without their own generation capacity and who also had access to the grids. Furthermore, the increased privileged feed-in of electricity from renewable forms of energy fell into this period.
As a result, there was a new wave of concentration in Germany around the turn of the millennium, in which the number of affiliated companies rose from nine (PREAG, Bewag, HEW, VEW, RWE, VEAG, Bayernwerk, Badenwerk, EVS) to four (RWE, EnBW, E.ON, Vattenfall) reduced.
As a further far-reaching measure, the EU decided in 2009 as part of the so-called third internal market package (with directives to amend and supplement the existing directives Directive 2003/54 on the internal electricity market | 2003/54 on the internal electricity market and directive 1228/2003 on cross-border electricity trading) to unbundle the Transmission system operator . The affiliated companies were given the requirement to separate generation and network operation in terms of accounting and corporate law. As a result, the four German network companies each outsourced network operation under a new, neutral company to a separate company, which was then sold in whole or in part under pressure from the cartel supervisory authorities.
Structure overview
| step | activity | Companies | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| technically | economic ( value chain ) |
historical | today (liberalized) |
||
|
generation | Operation of power plants and feeding into the grid | production | Transmission companies (vertically integrated company, from power plant operators + grid operators ) |
Large power plant operator + decentralized power generator |
|
|
transmission | Operation of supraregional transmission lines, interconnected networks and load distributors ( maximum and high voltage networks ) | Wholesale | Transmission system operator / electricity trader | |
|
|
distribution | Operation of regional distribution networks (high and medium voltage networks ) | " Überlandwerk " (regional supplier, mostly subsidiary of the affiliated companies) | Distribution network operator (regional supplier) | |
|
|
Supply (in the narrower sense) |
Operation of local distribution networks (medium and low voltage networks ), connection of end consumers | retail trade | in urban areas: mostly municipal utilities , in rural areas: mostly regional suppliers |
Municipal utilities, regional suppliers, "new" providers ( electricity traders ) |
Situation by country
Germany
Industry association: Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (until 2007: Association of the Electricity Industry )
Austria
Industry association: Austria's E- Industry (until 2010: Association of Austrian Electricity Companies )
Switzerland
The emergence of the Swiss electricity industry can be traced back to the year 1879, when Johannes Badrutt had electric lighting with arc lamps installed for the first time in the Kulmhotel St. Moritz , which was supplied by a 7 kW hydropower plant. The first small power plant (180 hp ) to supply municipal lighting was operated in Lausanne from 1882 . A national milestone in electricity transmission was the several km long direct current line from a power plant in Biel's Taubenloch Gorge to the wire drawing shop in the Biel-Bözingen district in 1884. In 1886, the 2000 HP Taulan power plant near Montreux was inaugurated. The 112 small power plants built by 1900 were operated with water turbines and some with steam engines . They were mainly used for lighting purposes, with industrial motor drives and later heating applications also increasingly being added.
The first beginnings were followed by almost an investment boom in hydropower at the turn of the century, divided into run-of- river power plants in the plains and storage power plants in more mountainous regions, now all based on alternating current . Ruppoldingen, the first pumped storage power plant, went into operation as early as 1920 .
In addition to the large-scale Grande Dixence and Mauvoisin plants and a large number of medium-sized hydropower plants, a number of thermal power plants went into operation in the following decades , the largest of which with 286 MW output was the Chavalon oil-thermal plant near Vouvry VS from 1965, although this has been since the 1990s is shut down.
Before the commissioning of Lucen's second nuclear power plant, Beznau 1, which was shut down again for a short period due to an accident , the hydropower share in Swiss electricity production was 99 percent. After then the block 2 of the Beznau, the nuclear power plant Mühleberg , the Gösgen nuclear power plant , the nuclear power plant Leibstadt and on the other hand, the hydropower-scale plant Cleuson Dixence shots successively the operation, this share is only around 60 percent today. New renewable energies , such as solar and wind power, continue to show relatively modest growth rates in Switzerland .
Switzerland is logistically as an electricity hub in Europe. The industry association is the Association of Swiss Electricity Companies (VSE).
literature
- Leonhard Müller: Handbook of the electricity industry: Technical, economic and legal bases . 2nd Edition. Springer, 2001, ISBN 3-540-67637-6 .
- EW Medien und Kongresse GmbH (ed.): Ew - the magazine for the energy industry . EW Medien und Kongresse GmbH, ISSN 1619-5795 .
- Richard Fischer: electricity industry (= Sammlung Goschen . No. 995 ). W. de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1928, DNB 579819582 .
- Günter Knieps (ed.): Between regulation and competition . Birkhäuser, 2002, ISBN 3-7908-1535-7 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- Bernhard Stier: The new history of electricity between cultural-historical expansion and communication-political instrumentalization: Comments on the state of research at the end of the "long 20th century of electricity" . In: Quarterly for social and economic history . tape 87 , no. 4 , 2000, pp. 477-487 ( full text [PDF; 647 kB ]).
- Bernhard Stier: State and electricity: the political control of the electricity system in Germany 1890–1950 (= technology + work . Volume 10 ). Regional culture, Ubstadt-Weiher 1999, ISBN 3-89735-107-2 .
- Wolfgang Leiner: History of the electricity industry in Württemberg. Volume 2. 1. The period of full coverage (1896–1915). Ed .: Energy-Supply Schwaben AG. Stuttgart 1985.
- J. Mutzner: The power supply in Switzerland - development and structure (publication on the 100th anniversary of VSE ), 1995.
- Heinz-J. Bontrup, Ralf.-M. Marquardt: The future of the big energy suppliers. Munich and Constance 2015, ISBN 978-3-86764-636-9 .
Web links
- Klaus-Dieter Maubach: Electricity Industry. Lectures as video. Institute for Electrical Energy Technology, Clausthal University of Technology, accessed on July 5, 2011 .
- Prof. Dr.-Ing. Günter Langhammer: The history of energy supply in Germany. Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, accessed on July 5, 2011 .
- Energy Charts : Interactive graphics on electricity production and stock exchange electricity prices in Germany from Fraunhofer ISE , accessed on April 19, 2019.
- Agorameter : Interactive graphics for energy performance indicators from Agora Energiewende , accessed on April 20, 2019.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Anja Birke, Vanessa Hensel, Olaf Hirschfeld, Thomas Lenk: The East German electricity industry between public property and competition . University of Leipzig, Institute for Finance, Dept. of Public Finance, November 2000, ISSN 1437-5761 ( full text on uni-leipzig.de [PDF]).
- ↑ a b c d Udo Leuschner : The development of the German power supply until 1998. Accessed on July 5, 2011 .
- ↑ Dieter Schott: Energy and City in Europe: from the pre-industrial “wood shortage” to the oil crisis of the 1970s: Contributions to the 3rd International Conference on Urban History in Budapest 1996 (= quarterly for social and economic history . Volume 135 ). Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-515-07155-5 .
- ↑ Wolfgang König: Geschichte der Konsumgesellschaft (= quarterly for social and economic history: supplements . Volume 154 ). Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-515-07650-6 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
- ^ Christian von Hirschhausen: Basic features of the electricity industry . Lecture notes. Technische Universität Dresden, Endowed Chair of Energy Economics, Dresden 2003 ( full text on tu-dresden.de [PDF]).
- ↑ Birgit Ortlieb: European Union - Third internal market package for electricity and gas market liberalization has been adopted. (No longer available online.) Institute for Energy and Competition Law in the Municipal Economy e. V. (EWeRK), July 20, 2009, archived from the original on January 4, 2014 ; Retrieved August 3, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Philipp Schulz: The dominance of the four large utility companies . Seminar paper. TU Dresden, Faculty of Economics, Chair for Empirical Finance and Financial Policy, Dresden November 4, 2010 ( full text on tu-dresden.de [PDF]).
- ^ David Gugerli: Streams of Speech. On the electrification of Switzerland 1880–1914. Chronos Verlag, Zurich 1996, ISBN 3-905311-91-7 , pages 25, 27 ( online )
- ↑ St. Moritz Energie: History & Pioneering Spirit
