German Renewable Energy Auction Model Is A Failure

Originally published on The Lenz Blog.
By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

Hans-Josef Fell posts (in German) about recent developments in German renewable energy.

The auction volume from April 2015 to August 2016 was only an anemic 740 MW. And only 121 MW of that has been actually built until September 16 of this year.

The auctions of April and August 2015 had a volume of 150 MW, and only 49 (less than one third) has been built.

The auction model is a move away from the market. Now the state decides on the ceiling of new installations.

And with only one third of those ceilings actually built, the result is a complete disaster. I recall that Germany used to build 7 GW of solar a year under a market-based feed-in tariff. Now we get close to nothing.

This doesn’t make any sense. Cost of new solar has gone down. Why stop now? And isn’t there some sense of urgency about global warming?

Fell also explains that the number of citizen investment funds to start renewable projects has gone down from a peak of 194 in 2011 to only 29 in 2014.

Reprinted with permission.