Where Do Germany's Electricity Imports Come From?

In 2023, Germany's electricity trade balance shifted from net exports to net imports for the first time since 2002, resulting in an increasing discussion of these imports in the public debate. This study discusses different data driven approaches for the analysis of Germany's cross-border trade, with a focus on the methodological challenges to determine the origin of imported electricity within the framework of European electricity market coupling. While scheduled commercial flows from ENTSO-E are often used as indicators, generally these do not correspond to bilateral exchanges between different market actors. In particular, for day-ahead market coupling only net positions have an economically reasonable interpretation, and scheduled commercial exchanges are defined through ex-post algorithmic calculations. Any measure of the origin of electricity imports thus depends on some underlying interpretation and corresponding method, ranging from local flow patterns to correlations in net positions. To illustrate this dependence on methodological choices, we compare different approaches to determine the origin of electricity imports for hourly European power system data for 2024.