Germany reported a 17.4% increase in solar energy generation in 2025, to 70.1 billion kWh, a new record high, new data from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) has found.
Photovoltaics now account for 16% of total domestic electricity production in Germany.
The share of wind power in electricity generation declined slightly last year – from 31.5% in 2024 to 30.0% in 2025 – with the amount of electricity generated from wind falling by 3.6% year-on-year, to 131.3 billion kWh.
‘Nevertheless, wind power remained the most important energy source for domestic electricity generation,’ Destatis noted.
Hydropower, another renewable energy source, reported a notable decline of 22.5% in electricity production last year, representing 3.6% of total electricity generation.
Renewable energy share
The overall share of renewable energy sources accounted for 58.6% of electricity generation in 2025, down from 59.5% in 2024.
However, the total amount of electricity generated from renewable sources remained almost unchanged in 2025, at 256.9 billion kWh (-0.1%), Destatis noted.
Conventional energy sources
In terms of conventional energy sources, coal-fired electricity saw a slight drop of 0.5%, producing 96.8 billion kWh, representing 22.1% of the electricity mix, while electricity feed-on from natural gas increased significantly, rising by 10.1% to 70.6 billion kWh. Natural gas accounted for 16.1% of total electricity production in Germany last year.
‘A clear long-term trend is evident in domestic electricity generation,’ Destatis noted. ‘While conventional energy sources dominated until 2022, more electricity has been generated from renewable energy sources since 2023. By 2025, more electricity from renewable than from conventional energy sources was fed into the grid in almost every month.’
Despite these trends, electricity generation in Germany remains ‘significantly lower’ than in 2018, when Destatis began collecting information on this topic. In 2018, domestically-generated electricity amounted to 566.8 billion kWh, while in 2025, it stood at 438.2 billion kWh, a 22.7% decline. While up until 2022, Germany was a net exporter of electricity, this reversed in 2023, and has remained that way in the years since. Read more here.
