Germany's new coalition government has pledged it will unleash solar energy with the introduction of a Solar Acceleration Package as part of measures it deems necessary to push renewables, to meet the country's new climate protection targets.
The solar package will include increasing tender thresholds, opening up land for ground mounted solar installations, increase in tenant electricity and making solar mandatory for all new commercial buildings and all new private buildings with a view to encouraging rooftop solar for all suitable roofs.
For this, the administration would act to remove barriers and bureaucratic hurdles to accelerate solar expansion. The idea is to target 20 GW of annual capacity target to be able to achieve 200 GW target for solar by 2030 (see 200 GW Solar PV For Germany By 2030).
In a press conference held recently, the German Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWi) Robert Habeck shared what he termed the opening balance sheet on climate protection. He called previous climate protection measures as inadequate fearing that the country may not be able to meet its 2022 and 2023 targets, and that the need of the hour is to triple the speed of its emissions reductions.
He added, "We want to become climate neutral by 2045 and increase the share of renewable energies to 80% by 2030. The work for it has started. We are now putting the priority laws, ordinances and measures on the track—a first climate protection package will come by the end of April, a second in summer."
Habeck also said under its Renewable Energy Act (EEG), the country would be chasing 80% renewable electricity generation by 2030 hence tender volumes will increase. The government will finance the EEG surcharge, which is currently paid through the electricity bills of German power consumers, from the federal budget from 2023 onward to bring down electricity prices.
The slew of announcements by the minister also included a provision to reserve 2% of the national area for wind energy, targeting 50% renewable energy share in heating by 2030, take measures to double green hydrogen production compared to previous plans, among others.
On BMWi's website, the said the balance sheet for climate protection as announced by the minister can be read in German language. The working plan includes a graph that shows the annual installation targets for solar and wind by 2020 (see below). While the displayed graphs are not broken down into exact numbers in the text, from the graph it can be seen that – after around 5 GW was installed in 2021 with little growth over the 4.9 GW in 2020, the annual German solar market is planned to grow continuously over the coming years and reaches around 9 GW in 2023, around 13 GW in 2024 and 20 GW in 2028.
Habeck promised the government will come out with other similar measures for various sectors that would be announced in the coming months.
Local solar industry association, BSW-Solar welcomed the package announcement for for solar with its General Manager Carsten Körnig saying, "The new federal government seems to have recognized the key role of solar energy in solving the climate crisis and the urgency of course corrections. The industry has high expectations of them and hopes that solar energy will be unleashed quickly. Now it is important that the most important market barriers are quickly removed in the announced solar acceleration package."
In August 2021, BSW Solar had called on the government to bring in a Solar Acceleration Act (see Europe PV Snippets: Enlight, Solaria, Voltalia, Sonnedix, BSW).