Germany's 1st onshore wind tender awards 807 MW

Projects with a combined capacity of 807 MW won Germany’s first onshore wind auction, with the average successful bid being of EUR 57.1 (USD 63.7) per MWh.

The Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagetur) said today that 65 of the 70 winning bids have been made by citizens' co-operatives developing community wind projects. The other five winning projects included three by a unit of Innogy SE (ETR:IGY).

As previously announced, Germany is taking measures to limit the expansion of wind power in areas where the grid requires upgrades, especially in the north where the wind resource is better. In the tender there was a limit of 258 MW for contract awards in the network expansion area, which includes Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Bremen and Hamburg, and the northern part of Lower Saxony. For community projects in that area the subsidy award in the auction arrived at EUR 55.8/MWh, while the other community projects got EUR 57.8/MWh.

The tender received 256 proposals for a total capacity of 2,137 MW. Further calls for onshore wind are planned for August and November.

According to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), Germany had a bit more than 50 GW of installed wind power generation capacity at the end of 2016. Deployment was supported by fixed surcharges offered until the start of 2017 when the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) 2017 entered into force. The tenders now are showing that the cost of wind energy can go down thanks to competition. The bidding cap in that first tender was of EUR 70 per MWh.

Germany recently also concluded its first offshore wind tender, in which the highest bid received was for just EUR 60 per MWh of subsidy, while the lowest was for zero subsidy.

(EUR 1 = USD 1.11)

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