On October 2nd, 2018 at 9am the application for the Dutch renewable energy, the SDE+ subsidy, will open again. As explained in our previous article on the SDE+ sheme, twice a year developers of renewable energy projects in the Netherlands have the opportunity to apply for subsidy for their project. 6 Billion euro are available for this autumn round. This article summarizes this year’s spring results and the expectation for the autumn round both for wind and solar.
Opened in March, the spring SDE round received 4,535 applications. 86% of these projects where granted with subsidy for a total value of 3.6 billion euros. With a total allocated budget of 6 billion euros, we can estimate that the remaining 14% applications did not meet the criteria.
It is difficult to estimate if these projects will meet the criteria before the opening of the Autumn round and apply again for this new round. We can however estimate that solar-pv projects in the Netherlands will grow rapidly. As shown below, 97% of the project that where granted subsidy during spring round are solar-pv projects:
Every round of application is divided in three phases, based on a price per kWh. For this autumn round, the first two phases will stay open for 2 weeks which is longer than usual. Furthermore, the subsidy base-price for solar-PV projects will be lower. The base-price for Solar-PV for projects smaller than 1 MWp will decrease from € 0.112/kWh to € 0.106/kWh, projects bigger than 1 MWp will have to deal with a decrease from € 0.107/kWh to € 0.099/kWh.
We have to ask ourselves if this decrease will lead to less solar-pv applications? According to the institute that advises the Dutch government on implementing base-prices, the cost for solar-pv development keeps on decreasing as well. Therefore, projects with this lower subsidy will stay feasible.
We can notice that since 2017 solar-pv is taking a significant part of the budget. Interesting to see, however is that the part of the budget that went to wind projects is until now 72% lower than last year. It is expected that the autumn round will be dominated again by solar-pv projects.
The decrease in the base-price of the subsidy might not slowdown the application for subsidy, it does however, force developers to rethink their development strategies to keep their projects profitable. External advisory on design and business cases will become more & more important. As Greensolver’s motto states “We are Asset Maximizers”, we are your perfect companion in realizing your renewable energy project! Do not hesitate to contact us.
