Germany awards 2.1GW of ground-mounted solar in first tender since Solarpaket reforms

The German Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) has awarded 2.152GW of new solar capacity in its latest public tender.

The auction closed on 1st July almost twice oversubscribed after 4,206MW of applications were submitted for the 2,148MW of tendered capacity. 495 bids were submitted and 286 accepted.

Klaus Müller, Budesnetzagentur president, said that the high rate of competition drove awarded prices down for this auction and reduced the need for funding support from the government.

Prices were awarded between €0.045/kWh and €0.052/kWh, with an average volume-weighted price awarded at €0.0505/kWh. This is roughly on a par with the price awarded in the previous auction round of €0.0511/kWh.

The previous iteration of the ground-mount auction closed in March with 2.2GW of capacity awarded. It was similarly oversubscribed and closed with over 4GW of applications for the available capacity. 68 projects were rejected over failure to comply with the auction’s stipulations.

As with the previous two auctions, Bavaria was the region with the highest awarded capacity under the tender. 700MW of capacity across 118 bids was awarded in the region, compared with 244MW in Schleswig-Holstein and 231MW in Brandenburg.

This auction was the first announced since the German parliament introduced the Solarpaket I reforms to the country’s solar sector. However, not all of the proposed reforms were in effect for this process; the move to raise the maximum output for tendered projects to 50MW – from the current 20MW – did not apply to the 1st July auction. The Bundesnetzagentur said that the 68 rejected bids were rejected on this basis.

The auction did benefit from Solarpaket I’s expansion of the available land for public solar auctions. Arable and grassland areas of ‘limited’ agricultural use were applicable in all of Germany’s states for this tender, and almost half of the successful capacity (1,037MW) was issued on such land.

Before Solarpaket I had entered into law, there were already calls for a second Solarpaket with further reforms to make rooftop solar more widely accessible.

Long the leading light of the European solar market, Germany has set out vast deployment targets in its National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) drafts. By the end of this decade, the government wants to reach 215GW of deployed solar PV capacity, which is more than the targets of France, Italy and Spain combined. By 2040, that target will expand to 400GW.

Beyond ground-mounted solar auctions, the Bundesnetzagentur recently announced the results of its solar-plus-storage and rooftop solar auctions, both of which ended strongly. The former – known as the Innovation auction – saw 512MW of solar-plus-storage projects awarded whilst 260MW of rooftop PV capacity was granted.