Recent reform of Germany’s renewables legislation has enacted a new feed-in tariff reduction mechanism.

Image: Maria Eklind/Flickr

Germany’s federal network agency, the Bundesnetzagentur, has reported that 525 MW of new PV was installed in the country in December.

For comparison, the newly installed PV capacity for December 2019 was 339.4 MW, and in November 2020 it was 480 MW.

In 2020, new PV additions reached 4.88 GW, which means that the country saw its installed PV power increase by around 1 GW more than in 2019, when annual PV additions hit 3.94 GW. In 2018 and 2017, new capacity totaled 2.96 GW and 1.75 GW, respectively.

At the end of the year, Germany boasted a cumulative 53.6 GW of grid-connected solar, installed under national renewable energy laws the Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG).

As a result of the strong growth registered in the past months, all the FITs for PV installations will be reduced by another 1.4%, and will range from €0.0804-0.0553/kWh, depending on the system size. A new digression FIT mechanism has come into force with the recent reform of the EEG.

Under these new provisions, the FITs are maintained for PV sytems up to 300 kW while the owners of PV installations ranging in size from 300 kW to 750 kW are given two different options: building their projects under the tender scheme for utility scale PV – but without being allowed self-consumption; or receiving a FIT – halved compared to smaller systems – but with permission to self-consume the generated energy.