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People wearing face masks walk along a street in Berlin, Germany.
People wearing face masks walk along a street in Berlin, Germany.Peng Dawei/China News Service via Getty Image
Police vehicles drive through Freiburg's city centre
Police vehicles drive through Freiburg's city centre.Philipp von Ditfurth/picture alliance via Getty Images
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Solar panels on the roof of a home in Brandenburg, Germany
Solar panels on the roof of a home in Brandenburg, GermanyPatrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images
The Ossietzkystraße in Pankow, Germany has been converted into a bicycle street.
The Ossietzkystraße in Pankow, Germany has been converted into a bicycle street.Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance via Getty Images
An otherwise very busy shopping street in Berlin, has been quiet amid the coronavirus.
An otherwise very busy shopping street in Berlin, has been quiet amid the coronavirus.Wolfgang Kumm/picture alliance via Getty Images
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Germany’s solar panels produced a record amount of electricity this week — a silver lining of the coronavirus pandemic, which has drastically reduced air pollution, according to a report.

Photovoltaic plants churned out 32,227 megawatts on Monday, beating the previous record on March 23, as clear conditions are forecast for the rest of the week, according to Time, which cited Germany’s DWD weather service.

“There is hardly a cloud over Germany,” DWD rep Andreas Friedrich told the mag. “And a high-pressure system over Scandinavia will keep these conditions in place until at least Friday.”

But the good green news meant Germany’s coal industry took a hit.

The sunny skies meant solar energy generated as much as about 40 percent of the country’s power Monday, compared to the 22 percent produced by coal and nuclear, according to Agora Energiewende, a think tank funded by the European Climate Foundation.

“Every year there’s more installed solar, so the record gets broken nearly every spring,” BloombergNEF analyst Jenny Chase told Time, adding that fewer flights and cleaner air due to the coronavirus lockdowns may have boosted the supply coming from solar.

Meanwhile, the German government predicts that green power will make up roughly 80 percent of the electricity mix by 2038, compared with just over 40 percent in 2019, the news outlet reported.

“You have coal looking very much like the energy market’s loser,” Carlos Perez Linkenheil, a senior analyst at Berlin-based Energy Brainpool, told Time last week.

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