Results of the auction for solar farms that ended on 1 July 2024
Year of issue 2024
Date of issue 2024.08.30
The Bundesnetzagentur has today published details of the successful bids in the auctions for ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) installations that closed for bids on 1 July 2024. These are installations on open ground or that are on, affixed to or in a construction that is neither a building nor a noise barrier, which are referred to as "first-segment solar installations".
"This auction round was nearly twice oversubscribed, and the strong competition has led to low successful bids and thus to less public funding,"
said Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur.
High level of participation and low successful bids
The auction round that ended on 1 July 2024 was nearly twice oversubscribed. The auction was for a volume of 2,148 megawatts (MW). There were 495 bids with a combined volume of 4,206 MW. A total of 268 bids with a combined volume of 2,152 MW were successful.
The prices of the successful bids in the pay-as-bid auction ranged from 4.50 cents per kilowatt hour (ct/kWh) to 5.24 ct/kWh. The average volume-weighted award price in this round was 5.05 ct/kWh, which was similar to that of the previous round (5.11 ct/kWh).
Solar Package I has led to several changes to the auctions for ground-mounted solar PV installations, such as, for example, extending the delimited area. Bids for farmland or grassland that are of little use for agriculture could be included in this round in all federal states. Overall nearly half of all bids awarded went to projects on such land-use areas (1,037 MW, 123 bids).
In this round 63 bids were disqualified. The rules introduced by Solar Package I on increasing maximum output power to 50 MW and to a separate maximum bid price for special solar installations were not applied in this bidding round as these fall under the reservation on the granting of authorisations under state aid rules. This was the reason for several bids being disqualified.
The federal state with by far the most volume awarded was Bavaria (700 MW, 118 successful bids), followed by Schleswig-Holstein (244 MW, 22 bids) and Brandenburg (231 MW, 20 bids).
Next steps
Information on the next steps concerning the auction for first-segment solar installations that ended on 1 July 2024 is available on the Bundesnetzagentur's website at www.bundesnetzagentur.de/solaausschreibungen24-2 (in German).
The updated bidding round statistics will be published shortly.
The next auction for first-segment solar installations will close for bids on 1 December 2024.