German Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen said an update of the country's renewable energy law must focus on maintaining costs and integrating power from wind turbines and solar panels into the broader electricity market.
"Cost efficiency and market integration will be the leading issues in the new version," Roettgen said at a press conference in Berlin today. The minister said key points of the update could be put to Cabinet on June 6 and that wind will be at the center of renewable energy output in the country.
Germany, which put its nuclear power policy under review on safety concerns after explosions at Japanese reactors, is scrambling to boost output and alternative energy sources. That means managing both volatile output from wind turbines and solar panels, where generation depends on the weather, as well as costs for subsidizing the implementation of the technology.
Power grid operators are required to give priority to electricity from wind parks and solar panels over nuclear and fossil-fuel-fired power plants unless the stability of the network is threatened.
"We have to steer the legal framework to more market integration,"Roettgen said. "That means that those people who are generating renewable energy will soon have to see themselves not only as feeding in power to the grid for a tariff but that they have to increasingly become market actors who respond to supply and demand."
Germany plans to generate 80 percent of its power from renewable sources in 2050 and will have to "continue the course" of managing the associated costs, the minister said.
Roettgen cited two reductions in the above-market rate paid to solar panel owners since Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition took power in October 2009 as an example of cost-management. He didn't specify what further action the government will take.
