November 2025 |
251102 |
ENERGY CHRONICLE |
On November 13, the German Bundestag called on the federal government to present a comprehensive amendment to the Power Plant Grid Connection Ordinance of June 26, 2007, in the first quarter of next year. The new regulations are intended to "fundamentally improve and digitize the grid connection procedure for generation plants, consumers, and storage facilities in order to increase transparency and planning security, to resolve the backlog of connection requests, particularly from large battery storage facilities, industrial customers, and data centers, and to enable grid operators to deal with the acute situation of increasingly scarce grid connection capacities in a way that makes sense from an overall economic perspective."
Parliament thus approved a recommendation for a decision proposed by the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy together with its amendments to the Fourth Act Amending Energy Industry Law. Previously, in its statement on the amendment package, the Bundesrat had demanded a new paragraph be added to the Power Plant Grid Connection Ordinance (KraftNAV), according to which it would only apply to facilities for the generation of electrical energy within the meaning of Section 3 (43) of the definitions in the EnWG that are connected to the power grid with a voltage of at least 110 kilovolts and a rated output of 100 megawatts or more. In addition, it should be explicitly stated that the KraftNAV does not apply to energy storage facilities within the meaning of Section 3 (36).
For a better understanding of the aforementioned paragraphs, it is important to note that with the EnWG amendment that has now been passed, the definitions in Section 3 EnWG have also been renumbered and, in some cases, amended or supplemented. As a result, the alphabetical list no longer ends with “40 winter half-year,” but with “117 winter half-year.” Number 36 mentioned in the Bundesrat's statement was previously 18d. However, it continues to define the term “generation” unchanged as “facility for the generation of electrical energy”. The same applies to the definition of the term “energy storage facility”, which changed from 15d to number 43 but remains unchanged: “A facility in an electricity grid that defers the final use of electrical energy to a later point in time than its generation, or that converts electrical energy into a storable form of energy, stores such energy, and then converts it back into electrical energy or uses it as another energy source.”
The Federal Council justified its demand with the previous practice of applying the KraftNAV to electricity storage facilities as well, even though the ordinance was actually tailored to power plants. This hinders the urgently needed introduction of a “rule-based reservation procedure” to cope with the current flood of applications for grid connection of large battery storage facilities (251101). In its response to the Federal Council, the federal government also saw “a need for action to accelerate and simplify the procedures for grid connections to the electricity grid”. However, it was not prepared to address the problem in the manner proposed. Instead, it allowed itself to be given the task of submitting its own proposal in the near future via the recommendation of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy. In this respect, the initiative of the state representatives was not in vain.