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The German federal parliament has passed amendments to the Renewable Energy Sources Act 2023 (EEG 2023) to make biogas plants more flexible and secure follow-up funding. The package of measures aims to optimize the promotion of system-supporting flexible power generation from biomass and to increase planning security for existing biogas plants, especially those with an existing municipal heating grid connection.
The follow-up funding for existing plants will be extended from ten to twelve years to make it easier to adapt to the new system and to incentivize the necessary investments. These measures strengthen the role of the demand-driven use of biomass as an important pillar of the energy transition, especially in rural regions.
The tender volumes for biomass will be increased from around 2 GW to around 2.8 GW, with a particular focus on the years 2025 and 2026. The offsetting of unused tender volumes for biomethane is included in this. In addition, support is to be made more flexible with the requirement of at least three-fold overbuilding in order to improve its integration into the overall system.
In the future, biogas is to be used flexibly above all to compensate for fluctuations in wind and solar energy. To this end, the subsidy will be limited to a certain number of operating hours and the subsidy will be suspended if electricity prices are weakly positive (≤ 2 cents per kilowatt hour). The flexibility surcharge will be significantly increased from €65 to €100 per kilowatt per year in order to create incentives for demand-driven operation. The transition period for switching existing plants from subsidized to follow-up funding will be shortened from the current 5 to just 3.5 years. For smaller biogas plants up to 350 kilowatts, a de minimis limit has also been introduced, in which an overbuilding of around two times is already sufficient for a subsidy. In addition, a further reduction in the maize cap from 35 to 30 percent by mass from 2025 and from 30 to 25 percent by mass from 2026 is planned.
February 3, 2025/ Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture/ Germany.
https://www.bmel.de/
