Electricity sup­ply in­ter­rup­tions in 2020

Year of issue 2021
Date of issue 2021.08.23

The Bundesnetzagentur has today published figures on interruptions in the electricity supply in 2020.

"The electricity supply in Germany was again very reliable in 2020. Once again, the outage time was lower than in the previous year, which had been the lowest to date," said Jochen Homann, Bundesnetzagentur President. "As in the past, the energy transition and the growth in distributed generation have not had any negative effects on the quality of supply."

The average interruption in supply per connected final consumer was 10.73 minutes, 1.47 minutes less than the previous year's average and the lowest outage time since the first publication in 2006.

Bundesnetzagentur collects supply interruption data

Operators of energy supply networks report to the Bundesnetzagentur each year detailing all the supply interruptions lasting longer than three minutes that have occurred in their networks. The reports state the time, duration, extent and cause of the interruptions.

The System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI_EnWG) shows the average duration of unplanned interruptions to supply per connected final consumer and voltage level in a calendar year, not including those caused by force majeure.

For 2020, 860 network operators reported a total of 162,224 supply interruptions at low and medium-voltage level. The number of reports of interruptions was about 2,400 higher than in the previous year.

Figures for federal states and details of interruptions

As in the previous years, an anonymised list of the individual supply interruptions has been published in addition to the SAIDIEnWG figures for each federal state.
An overview of the electricity supply interruptions is available on the Bundesnetzagentur's website at www.bnetza.de/SAIDI-Strom (in German).

Press release (pdf / 489 KB)