High level of competition in May onshore wind and innovation auctions
Year of issue 2026
Date of issue 2026.06.09
The Bundesnetzagentur has today published the results of the onshore wind and innovation auctions that closed for bids on 1 May 2026.
“The auction for onshore wind energy was once again significantly oversubscribed. This is reflected in a further decrease in award prices
,” said Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur. “In the innovation auction, too, the bid volume was well above the auction volume. However here the award prices remained stable
.”
Auction for onshore wind plants
The auction was for a volume of 2,495 megawatts (MW). There were 628 bids with a total volume of 6,409 MW, of which 270 bids were successfully awarded by the Bundesnetzagentur with a combined volume of 2,499 MW. Some 13 bids had to be excluded from the procedure.
The prices of the successful bids in the pay-as-bid auction ranged from 4.44 cents per kilowatt hour (ct/kWh) to 5.19 ct/kWh. The volume-weighted average price of the successful bids has once again fallen considerably vis-à-vis the previous round and is now 5.06 ct/kWh (previous round: 5.54 ct/kWh). Since the auction in August 2024, the average award price has fallen steadily over a total of seven bidding rounds by more than 2 ct/kWh.
The federal state with the most volume awarded was Lower Saxony (628 MW, 70 winning bids), following by Brandenburg (468 MW, 47 winning bids) and North Rhine-Westphalia (353 MW, 31 winning bids).
Innovation auction
The volume put up for auction was 475 MW. A total of 46 bids with a volume of 749 MW were received, of these, the Bundesnetzagentur awarded 27 bids for a total volume of 482 MW. All of the bids were for combinations of solar installations and storage facilities. Two bids were disqualified from the auction.
The prices of the successful bids ranged from 4.75 ct/kWh to 5.61 ct/kWh. The average volume-weighted award price was 5.34 ct/kWh and was thus at the level of the previous round (5.31 ct/kWh).
The federal state with by far the largest volume awarded was Bavaria (287 MW, 15 winning bids). Further larger volumes were also awarded to Schleswig-Holstein (53 MW, two winning bids) and Brandenburg (51 MW, two winning bids).
Next steps
Further information about the auctions is available on the Bundesnetzagentur’s website (in German) at www.bundesnetzagentur.de/1098824 (onshore wind) and www.bundesnetzagentur.de/1098852 (innovation auction).
The next onshore wind auction will close for bids on 1 August 2026 and the next innovation auction on 1 September 2026.