Impact of the Renewable Energy Sources Act in Germany on electricity produced with solid biofuels – Lessons learned by monitoring the market development

Abstract The increased use of renewable energy is the declared objective of the European and German climate policies. According to the German government, renewable energies will contribute to 35 percent of electricity production by 2020. In a bid to meet these ambitious targets, the Germany government implemented the EEG 2000. This policy guaranteed a fixed tariff for 20 years to all renewable energy plant operators providing electricity to grid. Following this policy implementation, significant market growth could be verified for nearly all renewable energy sectors. Approximately 20 percent of Germany's electricity today is met be renewables. In order to ensure an efficient growth and encourage technology providers to optimize and develop new innovative technologies a constant market monitoring and periodic amendments to the feed-in tariffs are required. In order to monitor the impact of the EEG and the development of the solid biofuels within the German energy supply system a comprehensive database with about 10 000 datasets has been accumulated over the last decade. This inventory database with various types of information is continuously updated, integrated and validated for data quality. It has emerged that this represents now the most complete and relevant database in Germany. Through the analysis of this database it can be shown, that the enactment of the EEG in 2000 has resulted in a tenfold increase in the number, as well as in the installed capacity of biomass CHP plants. These biomass CHP plants now contribute approximately 9 percent of the total electricity generated from renewable energy sources. The database analysis has also identified that there is a correlation between technology options, stakeholders and biomass sources, as these have changed in line with the changes in framework conditions over the last three EEG periods.