Source: Energy & Management Powernews, August 09, 2022
Subsidized wind and solar power earned so much on the market in July that there is no "market premium" for them. And in August, direct marketing capacity is approaching 100,000 MW.
Power day-ahead prices set an all-time record in the German July average of more than 30 Ct/kWh and, accordingly, consistently lifted the market values of subsidized renewables to new levels. The direct marketing output registered for August is also a record figure.
A publication by the four German transmission system operators (TSOs) on August 5 shows that an hourly delivery on the day-ahead gray power market of the Epex Spot exchange earned an average of 31.5 Ct/kWh for the month. The June average was 21.8 Ct/kWh. The development is an expression of the intensified energy crisis.
The technologies in detail
Since the TSOs have to market the subsidized green power from plants up to 100 kW on the day ahead, they benefited from the drastic increase in quotations. For the first time, the market values of wind and solar power were consistently above 20 Ct/kWh, and significantly so:
- As in June, the most profitable was offshore wind power with 28.69 Ct/kWh - an increase of 8.13 Ct/kWh compared to the previous month.
- This was followed by onshore wind power with 27.82 Ct/kWh. This is 8.13 Ct/kWh more than in June. D
- the bulk of the 1.5 million PV systems on the roofs of single-family homes, which have an output of less than 100 kW, earned the TSOs 26.09 Ct/kWh in July. Although this is not a new record compared to December 2021, but another indication of the resolution of the cannibalization effect, which PV always delivered in previous summers and thus burdened the EEG account.
- The discounts of the various renewable technologies result from their respective feed-in profile, more precisely from the feed-in forecasts that are available to the TSOs on the previous day and according to which they distribute the forecast quantities to the day-ahead auction on the various hourly products.
- From other green technologies no market values are collected, as they allegedly play a minor role.
In total, the revenues of the TSOs for the EEG account may be assumed that direct marketers have made similarly high or in doubt even higher sales per kWh. This means that they are above their respective guaranteed purchase prices and therefore do not receive a market premium that should have covered the difference. However, they are allowed to keep their additional revenues as well as their further entitlement to up to 20 years of market premium. Operators of plants below 100 kW, i.e. mainly owners of rooftop PV plants, will get exactly their respective guaranteed off-take price anyway.
Even the differences compared to June are higher than the total market values that prevailed until August 2021 before the energy price rally.
Still negative hourly prices
And yet, even in the high-price month of July, there was at least one delivery hour with negative prices on the gray power market, the TSOs said. From six hours in a row, the subsidy "market premium" is not applicable for directly marketed plants that nevertheless feed in electricity at the same time.
Nearly 1 GW more direct marketing
In line with the expansion logic of the energy transition, more green power capacity has been registered for direct marketing for August than ever before: 96,248 MW. That is 976 MW more than for July. 84,612 MW were accounted for by subsidized direct marketing with "market premium". This was a plus of 247 MW compared to the previous month.
Equally stronger, namely by 729 MW, increased the power that was registered for unsubsidized "other direct marketing". Mainly this was due to the fact that the 400 MW offshore wind farm "Global Tech" left the market premium, in which he was still in July, for August. Its direct marketer, Axpo, keeps switching between the two direct marketing plays. Since April, the "Riffgat" wind farm with its 113 MW has finally been in subsidy-free direct marketing. Another 31 MW could not be located initially.
Second largest movement in the other direct marketing was a plus of 119 MW to 3,141 MW in PV. Onshore wind increased by only 36 MW to 6,940 MW.
Onshore, PV, and Biomass in Market Premium
In the market premium, onshore wind and PV increased slightly by 74 and 69 MW, respectively, to 48,799 MW and 20,534 MW. Biomass shrank by 2 MW to 6,997 MW, but increased by 24 MW to 474 MW in unsubsidized direct marketing. The other technologies remained in the low triple-digit MW range at best in both segments.
The TSOs have broken down the direct marketing output to individual plants on their transparency page .
Author: Georg Eble
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