Die Einführung der Ausschreibungen für Windenergie an Land im Jahr 2017 war mit verschiedenen politischen Zielen verknüpft, wie etwa einer wettbewerblichen Preisermittlung und einer daraus folgenden Absenkung der Vergütung.
Dieser Artikel analysiert, welche Ergebnisse sich zu den einzelnen Zielen eingestellt werden und ordnet diese in die international Literatur und Diskussion zu Ausschreibungen von Erneuerbaren Energien ein. Dazu wurden unter anderem die tatsächlich für die bezuschlagten Standorte resultierenden Vergütungshöhen hergeleitet und anhand der Jahresabschlüsse deutscher Windenergieanlagenhersteller die Wirkung der Auktionen analysiert.
Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Auktionen nicht zu geringeren Vergütungen geführt haben, obwohl die Stromgestehungskosten im selben Zeitraum gesunken sind. Die gesetzlich festgeschriebenen Ausbauziele wurden nicht erreicht und durch die unterzeichneten Auktionen orientiert sich die Vergütung weiterhin an einem politisch festgesetzten Wert. Darüber hinaus stellen wir einen Konzentrationsprozess bei der Akteursvielfalt und der geografischen Verteilung fest, der den politischen Zielen entgegen steht. Die deutsche Windindustrie litt unter geringen Produktionsmengen und reduzierten Margen, die sich bis zu existentiellen Risiken für große Unternehmen in der Branche auswuchsen.
Auf Basis der verfehlten politischen Zielsetzungen und des anhaltenden Engpasses im Projektangebot stellt sich die Frage, ob die Ausschreibungen ein geeignetes Instrument sind, um die geplanten hohen Ausbauziele zu erreichen. Schnellere und höhere Ausbauziele sowie der Fokus auf ein sicheres und resilientes Energiesystem sind weitere Gründe dafür, das Ausschreibungssystem als politisches Instrument für den Ausbau der Windenergie zu überdenken.
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Abbreviations used in this article: Community wind (CW) Energy core data registry (MaStR) Renewable Energy Sources Act (German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz, (EEG)) (RES Act) Federal Grid Agency (BNetzA)
The reference wind site is defined as a site with a mean wind speed of 6.45m/s in the height of 100m, a Hellmann shear factor of 0.25, and a roughness length of 0.1.
To encourage the participation of community wind (CW) actors, special regulations had been introduced for the 2017 auctions. Using legal loopholes, however, a large number of commercial developers managed to make use of the provisions. As a result, the regulation's most attractive component (the option to bid for unpermitted projects) was removed from the 2018 auctions onwards (Weiler et al. 2021a, 26).
We do not differentiate between CW bids (entitled to uniform pricing remuneration, see Table 1) and regular bids (remunerated on a pay as bid basis) as realization rates for 2017 with high CW-involvement were very low. For the auctions from 2018 on, average bid prices were close to the price ceiling. Hence the advantage of receiving the maximum strike price instead of the pay-as-bid rule was neglectable.
The representation is based on MaStR (Bundesnetzagentur, 2022a). Therefore, the displayed yearly commissioned auctioned capacity from 2019 ongoing does not match exactly the real commissioned capacity due to deviations in the MaStR and non-mandatory auction design for some assets, e.g. for small wind turbines.
The industry association (VDMA, 2022, 9) also concludes that "the lack of volume in connection with increased cost pressure led to reduced margins for turbine manufacturer and supplier."
Recent business strategy decisions by OEMs led to further closures of blade manufacturing facilities. Nordex and Vestas published plans to close their sites in Rostock and Lauchhammer (Eble, 2022). With these sites, blade production capability in Germany and another 1600 jobs are lost.
For 2017 to 2019, no single year data analysis is available from the source. However, commissioning in 2017 and 2018 from auction awards was low cf. Figure 5
The table compares two time periods: First, average values for the years 2010 to 2016 during the application of the feed-in tariff and second, average values for the successful bidders in the auction rounds from January 2018 to September 2019 (when the study period ended). Since the special regulations for CW groups were quickly withdrawn and had only temporary effects, the results for 2017 are not presented here. Note that the numbers do not add up to 100 per cent because different analyses for the focus of business activity, size, and regional presence of the firms were conducted. Company sizes were established according to the European typology of small- and medium-sized companies based on their balance sheet total, turnover, and the number of employees. The qualification “at least” refers to a large number of projects in this period, for which not all necessary data were available, but most did indicate an attribution to the community energy segment.
The definition of this group has been developed by (Weiler et al., 2021a) to measure the existing actor diversity. It differs substantially from that applied in the RES Act and does, thus, not encompass commercial developers wishing to benefit from the CW regulation in the RES Act.
With respect to the mostly undersubscribed rounds since 2018, it could be argued that the risk of being outcompeted in an auction has become low for community energy groups, reducing the deterring effect of auctions on small actors (Grashof, 2019). However, project development until building permission (and the right to participate in an auction) takes three to four years on average (Pietrowicz and Quentin, 2015; FA Wind, 2022d)—too long to anticipate future levels of competition with a high degree of confidence.
Metadaten
Titel
Good intentions, wrong tooling? A review of onshore wind energy auctions in Germany from 2017 to 2021
verfasst von
Volker Berkhout Katherina Grashof Robert Cernusko Bendix Schmid