Dunkelflaute: the weather pattern behind two dark, still weeks in Europe

German has a word for the weather much of northern Europe has had since the end of October: dunkelflaute. Dunkel is dark, and Flaute is the sailor's word for a dead calm, the kind of day when a sailing ship goes nowhere. Put together it means a spell of grey skies, short days and hardly any wind, so that solar panels and wind turbines give very little power at the time of year when we need the most of it. It went from energy jargon to news headlines in only a few years. Most of what gets written about it is about the power system: prices, gas, coal, imports. Here I want to look at the other half, the weather. What did the atmosphere over Europe actually do for these two weeks, and why is it so good at switching off wind and sun at the same time? How much power went missingFirst the size of the problem. Germany has the largest wind fleet in Europe, and the Energy-Charts data from Fraunhofer ISE [1] show the drop clearly: Germany's public net electricity generation by source, hourly,…

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