The German Federal Network Agency, Bundesnetzagentur, has launched an innovation tender, and aims to award 475MW of new solar PV capacity by May.
Applicants will have to make bids for the capacity by 4 May—pushed back from 1 May as this is a public holiday—with the maximum bid price set at 7.13 euro cents/kWh (6.3 US dollar cents/kWh). This latest tender focuses on smaller utility-scale deployments, with applicants welcome to bid for projects up to 20MW in capacity; applicants can submit bids for projects up to 50MW, but must secure approval by 30 April under the Solarpaket I reforms first introduced in 2024.
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Bidders are also welcome to make bids for projects on agricultural land. The Bundesnetzagentur notes that applications can be made for agrivoltaics (agriPV) projects, provided the total capacity of agriPV in operation in Germany does not exceed 80GW; as of 31 January 2026, the last date on which data was collected, Germany had 16.5GW of agriPV in operation.
The May auction has a slightly higher maximum bid price than the highest bids that were awarded capacity in the previous auction, which was completed in February. This auction—which saw 2.4GW of capacity awarded—saw maximum bid prices of 5.3 Euro cents/kWh, with an average price of 5.00 Euro cents/kWh. The German auctions have been consistently oversubscribed in recent months, with the February auction receiving bids for over 5.2GW of capacity, building on bids of almost 600MW of excess capacity in August 2025.
The German Federal Network Agency plans to follow the current auction with a second bidding process later this year. The agency is obligated to offer 950MW of capacity in tenders this year, and said that this capacity would be split “evenly” across this year, reflecting sustained interest in government auctions for new solar capacity.
The auction is the latest round of state support for solar PV in Germany, which has become an integral part of the European solar sector. A report from SolarPower Europe found that, in 2025, developers were more interested in financing projects through government auctions, rather than corporate power purchase agreements (PPAs), and the report’s authors explained to PV Tech Premium that Germany has long been a leader in the national auction space.
