EU Approves Germany's Renewable Energy Act Changes
According to foreign media reports, the European Commission has approved the German government’s revised Renewable Energy Act 2023 (EEG 2023), which aims to expand and modify Germany’s support for renewable energy development.
Germany’s revised Renewable Energy Act 2023 (EEG 2023) has a total budget of 28 billion euros (about $29.6 billion) and aims to get 80% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030, with a view to achieving climate neutrality by 2045. The revised bill will come into force by the end of 2026.
Under the bill, Germany will introduce an effective quantity control mechanism to encourage innovation in tenders, and tenders will be held for photovoltaic projects as well as onshore wind and biomethane projects.
This mechanism will help maintain the number of tenders for each renewable energy technology and avoid undersubscription.
Just in the past six months, bids for ground-mounted PV projects in Germany have been undersubscribed for a variety of reasons, including price fluctuations in PV modules, which PV developers struggle to procure.
The financial assistance in the bill would take the form of PV developers paying a market premium to power producers based on market prices.
The successful bidder will be selected through competitive bidding and will be organized based on the bidder’s renewable energy technology.
From January 2027, Germany will completely remove support for renewable energy production when demand falls and prices fall, in order to avoid overcompensating renewable energy developers and producers.
The installation of onshore wind, biomass and biomethane power generation facilities in southern Germany will help reduce the cost of clean energy deployment while ensuring the development of more renewable energy projects in high-energy regions.
The European Commission noted that Germany had committed to improving data collection and the use of ethical environmental protection methods and had approved amendments to the German Renewable Energy Act.
The European Commission considers such assistance to be appropriate and is provided through a premium based on the lowest bid in a transparent tendering process. The Commission further welcomed the introduction of a quantity control mechanism in tenders and considered that this would make the tender process competitive.
According to the “2022~2026 EU PV Market Outlook Report” released by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, Germany installed 7.9GW of photovoltaic systems in 2022, ranking first in the European photovoltaic industry. It is followed by Spain, which installed 7.5GW of photovoltaic systems in 2022. The report also points out that a total of 41.4GW of PV systems in Europe’s top ten PV markets are connected to the grid. In 2022, the cumulative installed capacity of photovoltaic systems installed in Europe reached 208.9GW, an increase of 25% year-on-year.
According to the German Federal Network Agency, Germany installed 4.9GW of PV systems in the first nine months of 2022, up 21% year-on-year, compared to 4.02GW in the same period last year.