Results of the auctions for onshore wind and solar installations on buildings and noise barriers
Year of issue 2024
Date of issue 2024.03.08
The Bundesnetzagentur has today published the results of the auctions for onshore wind farms and for solar installations on buildings and noise barriers, which closed for bids on 1 February 2024.
"We are still seeing a positive trend,with the onshore wind auctions continuing to show encouraging signs. We are not quite where we want to be to achieve our expansion targets for wind capacity, but we are making good progress,"
said Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur. "We have even seen a slight increase in the volumes bid for in the auctions for rooftop solar installations."
Onshore wind auctions
The auctions for onshore wind farms are continuing to show encouraging signs. Since the Bundesnetzagentur increased the price ceiling at the end of 2022, none of the auctions have had a combined bid volume of less than 1,400 megawatts.
The combined volume of the bids in the 2023 auctions amounted to 6.5 gigawatts. This was considerably more than in previous years. None of the years between 2018 and 2022 had a volume of more than 3.7 GW, and 2018 and 2019 even had less than 3 GW each.
The auction was for a volume of around 2,486 MW. There were 135 bids with a combined volume of about 1,836 MW, compared with 1,981 MW in the previous auction. The Bundesnetzagentur disqualified six bids due to formal errors and therefore awarded 129 bids. The prices of the winning bids ranged from 7.25 cents per kilowatt hour to the price ceiling of 7.35 ct/kWh. The volume-weighted average award price was 7.34 ct/kWh, just below the price ceiling.
The regional breakdown of the sites for which bids were awarded is similar to the previous auction. The federal states with the largest volumes awarded are North Rhine-Westphalia (32 awards with a combined volume of 379 MW), Lower Saxony (17 awards, 319 MW), Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (16 awards, 274 MW) and Brandenburg (14 awards, 244 MW).
Auction for solar installations on buildings and noise barriers
The auction for rooftop solar installations was oversubscribed. This auction was for a volume of 263 MW, and 194 bids with a combined volume of 378 MW were received. The Bundesnetzagentur disqualified nine bids due to formal errors.
A total of 125 bids with a combined volume of 264 MW were successful. The prices of the successful bids in the pay-as-bid auction ranged from 6.90 ct/kWh to 9.48 ct/kWh. The volume-weighted average award price was 8.92 ct/kWh, which is 1.5 cents below the lowered price ceiling (10.5 ct/kWh) and more than half a cent lower than the average in the previous auction (9.58 ct/kWh).
The awards are again spread evenly across the country, with winning projects in 14 federal states. Lower Saxony has the most winning projects (27 awards with a combined volume of 58 MW), followed by North Rhine-Westphalia (23 awards, 45 MW), Bavaria (13 bids, 27 MW), Rhineland-Palatinate (10 awards, 27 MW) and Hesse (10 awards, 26 MW).
Next steps
Further information about the auctions is available on the Bundesnetzagentur's website at:
www.bundesnetzagentur.de/solaraufdach24-1 (in German)
www.bundesnetzagentur.de/windausschreibungen24-1 (in German)
The statistics for the auctions are updated after each auction.
The next onshore wind auction will close for bids on 1 May 2024 and the next auction for second-segment solar installations on 1 June 2024.