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Germany: Monthly cuts of FITs planned

The suggestion has been put forth to reduce photovoltaic feed-in tariffs on a monthly basis instead of a half-yearly one. Via this solution, the Federal Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen hopes to prevent anymore occurrences of final spurts of PV installations, like it happened in December 2011.

The new proposal, as Röttgen says, is a refinement and not a change to the system.

SolarWorld

The new regulation should be implemented briskly, however, a renewed ammendment of the German Renewable Energy Act or EEG is seen as necessary. Röttgen and representatives of the solar industry have come to the consensus that the reduction of tariffs ought not to happen every half year but on a shorter monthly basis. 

The President of the German solar association, BSW-Solar, Günther Cramer assumes that this new regulation can already come into force within six weeks. For Cramer, it is essential that the maximum reduction of the tariffs ought not to exceed the half-yearly 15 percent, that is 30 percent annually. The decreases are to be distributed over the months as the proposal states.

Röttgen said that this is not a change of the system but, rather, a refinement of the EEG. 

The official next sinking of FITs had been planned initially for July, 1. The first cut on this date, due to the announcement of the approximate three gigawatts alone in December, would have been 15 percent. This would have added up to 30 percent by the end of the year. 

These proposed decreases have not been sufficient for a number of German politicians in the last months. Above all, Minister of Economics Philipp Rösler has been demanding for a cap on solar installations, to approximately 500 to 1,000 megawatts. This plea has been a repeated one.