Vattenfall Inks Deal With Evonik To Supply Solar Power For Chemical Production in Germany

Germany-based energy supplier company Vattenfall has signed a PPA with specialty chemicals company Evonik that concluded new long-term electricity supply contracts. From 2025, two Vattenfall solar parks in Schleswig-Holstein will supply Evonik with around 120 gigawatt hours of solar power per year for chemical production. The contracts have a term of ten years and fixed conditions.

Specifically, the Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) stipulate that Vattenfall will supply Evonik with electricity from two solar parks in Schleswig-Holstein. One solar park is located south of Flensburg in Silberstedt, with details of the second site to follow shortly. They are due to be completed and connected to the grid in 2025 with a total capacity of 120 megawatts peak (MWp). The agreed electricity volume of around 120 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year corresponds to the annual demand of around 35,000 households and displaces more than 50,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year in the German electricity mix. The current agreements are valid for 10 years.

“Germany is the fastest growing market for renewable energies in Europe,” emphasizes Martijn Hagens, member of the Executive Board and Head of Business Area Markets at Vattenfall. He also added, “We see a wide range of growth opportunities here for the development and marketing of our solar, onshore, and offshore projects. As the project with Evonik exemplifies, electricity partnerships with industry play a decisive role here.”

Observers expect demand for electricity partnerships between producers and industrial companies to increase in the coming years. According to a study by the German Energy Agency (Dena), the volume of PPAs in Germany could rise to 192 terawatt hours by 2030 – covering a quarter of Germany’s total electricity demand.

“Evonik has an ambitious sustainability strategy – and we are reliably implementing what we have set out to do: In 2022, Evonik concluded supply contracts for green electricity from wind power. In 2024, we look forward to the first major supply contracts for solar power. This marks another milestone on our way to converting our externally sourced electricity to 100% green by 2030,” noted Thomas Wessel, the Executive Board member responsible for sustainability.

Moreover, Evonik group also claimed that this initiative is the sheer balance that the company strives to achieve during the production stage stating that the forecast and actual generation of renewable energy sources often differ and to cope with this, Evonik has a balancing group management system for managing its chemical parks and sites. This enables Evonik to harmonize electricity supplies and demand.