Electricity Self-Consumption and German Ecotax

This post is part of a series discussing a new position paper by German Environment Minister Altmaier and Economy Minister Rösler on reducing cost of the feed-in tariff system.

One of the proposals in the position paper is including installations that produce electricity for self-consumption with over 2 MW capacity in the base of surcharge payments.

That proposal actually may become law, since it is supported also by the opposition Green party. The SPD answer to the proposals doesn’t mention the point at all.

I just looked at how self consumption is handled in the German ecotax law, and found out that it is done exactly as the new proposal for the feed-in tariff surcharge. Article 9 Paragraph 1 Number 3 of the Electricity Tax Law exempts all self consumption installations with less than 2 MW completely from the 2.05 cents euro per kWh ecotax.

That may be the reason why the new proposal also has this threshold. If so, there will be still plenty of room to install smaller solar rooftop systems and stay outside of the surcharge system, which means the permanent  advantage for the next big wave of solar in Germany (systems for self consumption) will stay largely intact.