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Starting April 1st, 2012 new feed-in tariff payments for rooftop PV plants smaller than 10kW will be €0.195/kWh, rates for rooftop PV up to 1MW will be €0.165/kWh and rates for ground-mounted and rooftop PV of 1-10MW in size will be €0.135/kWh.
Following the demonstration in Berlin on March 5, the German government has decided to delay the imposition of FiT cuts by one month.
EuPD Research belives the German government will introduce the FiT cuts from March 9, 2012, to eliminate a rush of installations to beat the tariff change.
Tariff changes include 19.5€c per kWh for small-scale to 16.5€c per kWh for larger systems and only 13.5€c per kWh for 10MW or below utility plant-scale systems.
Cuts will also be made via a new mechanism each month starting in May 2012 of 15€c per kWh, while utility-scale projects over 10MW will have all incentives withdrawn after July 1, 2012.
EuPD summary of key changes:
• Systems up to 10kW: 20.2% reduction to 19.5c per kWh.
• Systems from 10 to 1,000kW: between 25 and 29% reduction to 16.5c per kWh.
• Systems larger than 1,000kW: circa 26% reduction to 13.5c per kWh.
• Systems over 10,000kW: Future subsidies will be dropped entirely.
• New small systems will only be remunerated for 85% of the electricity produced; middle-sized and large systems will receive remuneration for 90%.
• The bonus for own consumption will be dropped.
• From May onwards, there will be a monthly cut (degression) of 0.15c per kWh for all new systems.
• From 2014 a continual decrease of the yearly installation corridor by 400 MW, and from 2017 the installation corridor will lie between 900 and 1,900MW.
Even with record installation levels, the feed-in tariff for PV installations for 2012 the government is proposing to reduce it by 15%. Depending on the type of installations, the 2012 feed-in tariffs for newly installed systems will therefore range from 17.94 ct/kWh to 24.43 ct/kWh.
All PV systems due to begin operation in 2011 will face a 13% cut in subsidy compared with current tariffs. Installation operators will therefore receive between €0.21.11 and €0.28.74 cents for each kilowatt hour of solar electricity fed into the mains, depending on size and location of the installation.
Since the 2010 tariffs were yet again decreased by the legislative branch, when calculating the degression for the coming year only, the notifications of new systems in the period beginning in June to end of September 2010 needed to be taken into account and then extrapolated to the entire year in line with the EEG.
The German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) came into effect in 2000 and was amended in 2004 and 2008. By the end of 2008 a total of 500,000 solar power systems had been installed on German roofs. Both private and institutional investors in photovoltaic systems now receive a guaranteed feed-in tariff for solar electricity fed into the grid. The EEG has since been revised again in 2010, outlining the cuts described above.
