German policymakers have outlawed negative bids in next year’s 1.6GW offshore wind tender after the bulk of capacity in the country’s first auction in April was won by zero subsidy bids.
The amendment to the Wind Energy at Sea Act has been made to prevent a downward spiral into negative prices.
The support mechanism would not have allowed negative subsidies, but it was thought that developers could have tried to offer a negative bid to win the auctions.
The Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, also lowered the price cap for offshore bids to €100 per megawatt hour (MWh) from €120 per MWh.
It also ruled that bidders in the first two onshore auctions next year will need to have a licence under Germany’s noise emissions legislation.
Wind energy industry federation BWE welcomed the move after 65 out of the 70 successful projects in the first onshore auction earlier this year were community-driven or co-operative wind projects that did not need a licence.
The German parliament also rubber-stamped reform of the grid fee structure.
Grid fees will gradually be standardised across Germany from 2019 until 2023 in order to avoid bigger payments in regions with a high share of renewables.
A payment to generators for so-called avoided grid fees will be frozen for existing controllable plants and abolished for new varible generation, such as solar and wind.
Power generators that supply electricity at a local or regional level have received the avoided grid fees payment to help cover costs for the transportation of power over larger distances.
“If you want the energy transition, you need a speedy grid expansion. Having a fair distribution of cost on all shoulders is decisive for the acceptance of this project,” said German economics and energy minister Brigitte Zypries.
“Therefore we diminish regional differences in grid fees in the future and gradually standardise grid fees for transmission grids,” she said.
German states in the north-east with a much higher density of wind farms than regions in the south have in the past complained that local consumers had to pay disproportionately higher grid fees.
Image: EWE
