“Flimsy business with green power”

Wind power operators might have manipulated the output of their installations for many years in order to receive a higher guaranteed remuneration via the renewables surcharge paid by power customers, Jakob Schlandt writes in Hamburger Abendblatt. Germany’s Renewable Energy Act (EEG) provides “a loophole” by granting operators of turbines at weak wind locations a higher remuneration than at very productive locations after five years, which might have prompted operators to throttle down their installation’s output in the initial phase, Schlandt says. A 2014 study by think tank Agora Energiewende* said that a single turbine could receive up to 600,000 euros more over the guaranteed remuneration time span of 20 years if manipulation of the EEG’s so-called “reference yield model” is carried out effectively, he writes. The German government has known about the loophole for years, Schlandt argues, adding that Berlin decided to look the other way and allowed operators to provide only incomplete data on their turbines’ daily output.

Read the article in German here.

See the CLEW dossier Onshore wind power in Germany for more information.

*Like the Clean Energy Wire, Agora Energiewende is a project funded by Stiftung Mercator and the European Climate Foundation.