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The past year has also brought unexpected upheavals in the field of energy. With the introduction of measures against the spread of the new coronavirus, electricity consumption fell by almost a tenth before it started to rise again and the decline for the third quarter stabilized at 1.8%. At the same time, the autumn tightening of the measures did not bring any significant decline; the year-on-year difference in consumption in the fourth quarter fell further to a mere percentage. Data from Amper Meteo, which deals with weather forecasts for the energy sector, also show interesting developments in the production of energy from renewable sources (RES).

Unprecedented fluctuating weather during 2020 added many wrinkles to the forehead of "green" energy producers, especially in the first half of the year, especially for hydropower operators. As a result of the exceptionally dry and warm winter, electricity production from water sources fell by 37.5% year-on-year in the first quarter, before the situation reversed with record rainfall in July. On 23 October 2020, the volume of electricity produced from hydroelectric sources since the beginning of the year equaled the total production for 2019, and finally 11.5% more electricity was produced last year than in the previous year.

Last year, the production of energy from wind power plants was only 1.2% or 8 GWh lower year-on-year than in 2019. In the autumn months, this difference was much more pronounced, amounting to almost ten percent. However, the end of the year was windier than expected, so that production from wind power plants increased by 13.2% year-on-year compared to December 2019.

Compared to 2019, the production of electricity from photovoltaic power plants also decreased last year, by a total of 5.3% and 122 GWh, respectively. The unexpectedly high decline in production occurred in the summer months, by about one-eighth year-on-year. "The biggest relative difference was in December, by 38%. However, in the last month of the year, production is generally low for obvious reasons. Photovoltaic panels produced the least electricity on December 3, only 137.5 MWh, due to cloudy skies and snow on the panels, ”adds Milan Šálek, the main meteorologist of Amper Meteo.

For most of 2020, it seemed to be quite clearly the warmest year in the history of measurements, but in December the effect of the colder ENSO phase, the La Niña effect, "took hold", the planet cooled relatively significantly (see also the second picture) and thus the temperature average 2020 to roughly the level of 2016 (according to NOAA / GISS slightly above it, according to HadCRUT4 again a little lower, see the first picture), but mostly in the area of ​​a typical error of measurement and calculation of this quantity, which is approximately 0.05 ° C. The second figure shows the monthly temperature deviations from the climate average, which show, among other things, that there has been a gradual cooling over the past year, which has so far peaked in December (although December was relatively warm in Europe).

However, these fluctuations in the order of months and individual years are rather short-term and do not have a significant effect on climate characteristics, as climate is described as a state (average and other statistical variables describing the weather) over decades; according to the World Meteorological Organization, the standard reference period for determining the climate is thirty years.