Germany’s latest public auction for ground-mounted solar PV capacity ended “significantly oversubscribed”, according to the German electricity regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur.
Companies collectively submitted 420 bids for 3,839MW worth of capacity bids to the auction, which had a total allotted capacity of 2,625MW; 271 bids were successful, with a combined capacity of 2,638MW.
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Bids were awarded at low prices, ranging between 3.99 cents/kWh and 4.88 cents/kWh. The volume-weighted average price was 4.66 cents/kWh.
Bavaria was awarded the most capacity of any state – 607MW across 85 bids – followed by Brandenburg (367MW, 24 bids) and Lower Saxony (315MW, 31 bids).
“The auction was again very well subscribed, with a consistently high level of competition and a further decrease in award prices,” said Klaus Müller, president of the Bundesnetzagentur. “The Bundesnetzagentur is very pleased about developments in this field of solar generation. These installations are all controllable and can adapt the amount of electricity they generate to the demand in the market.”
These auction results continue the trend of falling prices and high demand in German public solar auctions. The last ground-mount tender, which closed in February, registered the lowest prices in the scheme since 2019 – 4.76 cents/kWh; a landmark which the most recent round surpassed.
The February auction was also almost twice oversubscribed, as was the previous iteration in September and the round in April 2024.
The government changed the requirements for ground-mount solar tenders in its reforms to the Solarpaket programme. The changes, which were announced in April last year, widened the net of usable land for solar projects and proposed to the raise the upper threshold of tendered project capacity from 20MW to 50MW.
Germany’s so-called “innovation tenders” for solar-plus-storage projects and its rooftop solar tenders have also been oversubscribed.
These results reflect strong demand for PV in the country. The Bundesnetzagentur said that Germany had surpassed 100GW of cumulative solar PV capacity in February this year, and it continues to top European lists for annual installations.
