The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy has increased its overall budget for the spring round of the 2020 SDE+ (Stimulering Duurzame Energieproductie) program from €2 billion to €4 million.
“The past round has shown that there are a large number of projects that can make a cost-effective contribution in the relatively short term to the further sustainability of the energy transition,” said Eric Wiebes, the economic affairs minister, in a letter to the Dutch parliament. “By increasing the budget for the spring round, a larger portion of the available projects with a short realization time frame, such as solar projects, can be realized in the short term.”
Wiebes said that several projects that were excluded from the previous round will now have a chance to secure contracts in the upcoming round, which is also the final round of the SDE+ scheme.
In the last round, the Dutch government received €9.06 billion worth of applications for just €5 billion of available subsidies. Overall, developers of 7,525 renewables projects, with a total capacity of 6.22 GW, applied for funding in the autumn round.
In December, Wiebes said the autumn round of the 2019 SDE+ program included a “transportindicatie,” or “transport indication,” for the first time, which scrapped subsidies in parts of the country with grid-access constraints.
“This subsidy round has therefore shown that the transport indication has not had an inhibiting effect on the number of applications,” Wiebes said at the time. “In contrast, network operators have gained a better understanding of the number of projects that are still in the pipeline in the various regions and market parties have more insight into the locations where there is space on the electricity grid.”
In January, Dutch transmission system operator Enexis started to argue that capacity constraints were blocking the deployment of new solar projects in Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel. A few months earlier, Energie-Nederland, Holland Solar, and the Netherlands Wind Energy Association said that around 700 MW of solar and wind projects would miss out on SDE+ large scale renewables incentives if grid congestion in the northern regions is not properly addressed.
