Significant oversubscription in the auction for solar installations that ended on 1 December 2024
Year of issue 2025
Date of issue 2025.02.10
The Bundesnetzagentur has today announced the successful bids in the auction that ended on 1 December 2024 for ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) installations and solar installations on a construction that is neither a building nor a noise barrier (“first-segment solar installations”).
"The volume of the bids submitted in this round of ground-mounted solar PV auctions was again significantly higher than the volume up for auction. The continuously high level of competition has led to a further decrease in award prices and thus in public funding for new installations,"
said Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur.
Fifth successive auction round with a total bid volume over 4 gigawatts
The auction round that ended on 1 December 2024 was more than twice oversubscribed. The auction was for a volume of 2,148 megawatts (MW). There were 524 bids with a total volume of 4,708 MW, of which 242 with a combined volume of 2,150 MW were successful. A total of 45 bids were excluded from the proceedings.
The prices of the successful bids in the pay-as-bid auction ranged from 3.88 cents per kilowatt hour (ct/kWh) to 4.95 ct/kWh. The average volume-weighted award price in this round was 4.76 ct/kWh, which was approximately 6% below that of the previous round (5.05 ct/kWh). The last time such low award prices were recorded was in the auction round in February 2019.
The federal state with by far the most volume awarded was, as in previous rounds, Bavaria (916 MW, 120 winning bids), followed by Schleswig-Holstein (213 MW, 21 winning bids), Lower Saxony (192 MW, 18 winning bids), Baden-Württemberg (176 MW, 20 winning bids) and Brandenburg (170 MW, 13 winning bids).
The rules introduced by Solar Package I on increasing the maximum capacity of ground-mounted solar PV installations to 50 MW and on privileges for “special solar installations” could not be applied in this round as these still fall under the reservation on the granting of authorisations under state aid rules. The rules on fulfilling minimum nature conservation criteria, which were also introduced in Solar Package I, were applied for the first time ever in this auction. These criteria aim to improve the compatibility of ground-mounted solar PV installations receiving public funding with nature and the landscape.
Further information
Further information about the auction is available on the Bundesnetzagentur’s website (in German) at www.bundesnetzagentur.de/solarausschreibungen24-3.
The next auction for first-segment solar installations will close for bids on 1 March 2025.