Bavaria’s rules for promoting solar systems threaten to slow down expansion on arable and grassland areas in agriculturally disadvantaged areas this year. The “Ordinance on bids for open-space systems”, which has been in force since 2017, limits the number of projects eligible for funding to 200 – so far 184 systems have already received funding from the Federal Network Agency, which is why only 16 more projects can receive federal money in the last round.
This emerges from information from the Federal Network Agency, which is available to the German Press Agency. “As a result, a lot of very good and important projects for the energy transition would be slowed down by the state government and the last tender would, so to speak, be completely bypassed by Bavaria,” said the energy policy spokesman for the Greens in the Bavarian state parliament, Martin Stümpfig. In view of the numbers, he had already asked the state government in August to increase the regulation to 400 systems by the end of September.
The next round of applications for 2023 starts on December 1st – the last applications for money from the current year’s funding budget can be applied for here. From Stümpfig’s point of view, the assessment basis also needs to be changed – there needs to be a switch to performance. “We want a lot of projects – and especially smaller projects. Focusing on numbers doesn’t make sense at all,” said Stümpfig. It would make more sense to increase the amount to three gigawatts of ground-mounted solar systems. In order to be able to cover the growing energy needs in Bavaria, a massive expansion of solar power is also needed, says Stümpfig. This is all the more important because the expansion of wind power continues to progress too slowly. All hurdles in solar energy would have to be removed in order to quickly and significantly increase the backlog demand for covering own electricity consumption in Bavaria to over 50 percent.