In the first half of 2026, Germany curtailed a significant amount of renewable electricity because it lacked transmission lines to carry it, even as the country displayed 128 GWp of installed solar capacity and added 16.4 GW of solar in 2025; the 2030 target implies roughly 19.6 GW per year on average. The transmission network is not keeping pace with installations. Getting power where it needs to go is a growing challenge, but expanding new production capacity remains a central objective nonetheless.
The essentials
- Germany is reducing renewable injections during network congestion, a practice that intensifies as photovoltaic capacities increase, though the volumes of redispatch varied between quarters in 2026.
- In the first half of 2026, at least 1.412 TWh of photovoltaic production was subject to redispatch according to SMARD data from the Bundesnetzagentur, with a significant portion at negative prices.
- Congestion management interventions declined in the first two quarters of 2026 compared to the same quarters in 2025.
- The Netzanschlusspaket transfers a capped share of curtailment risk to new producers in congestion zones; its future effect on investment remains to be evaluated.
- Several trajectories remain possible: expansion of the transmission network, accelerated deployment of distributed storage, or increasing curtailments if transport and storage capacities do not adjust to rising installation levels.
128 GWp installed, but the network dates from before the transition
Germany’s solar park was designed for production. Support policies—guaranteed tariffs, competitive tenders, self-consumption subsidies—have done their job. Over ten years, installed solar capacity has roughly tripled. A target of 128 GW is envisioned for 2026 according to the official trajectory, while 117 GW of solar power were actually installed by the end of 2025.
The transmission network, meanwhile, was built for something else. Conceived around large centralized power plants in the north and east, it does not anticipate thousands of dispersed injection points that vary constantly and often concentrate during the same hours. On sunny days in May or June, entire regions inject their surplus simultaneously. The lines become saturated. Network operators intervene urgently to rebalance frequency.
Interventions rose slightly in the first quarter and then fell in the second quarter of 2026.
The problem worsens with each additional gigawatt. For a long time, Germany could export its surpluses to France, Poland, or the Netherlands. That pressure valve still works, but cross-border interconnections are themselves constrained, and neighboring countries experience their own solar peaks during the same hours.
Three gigawatt-hours curtailed: a measurable loss that masks a larger one
Curtailment is the technical term for a simple reality: electricity that has been produced, or could be, is deliberately suppressed because the network cannot absorb it. In the first half of 2026, a significant amount of electricity was curtailed in Germany, a modest figure in absolute terms, but one whose trajectory concerns operators.
In other words, producers were paying not to produce, or more precisely, to continue injecting into a network that no longer wanted their power. A negative price on the wholesale market means supply so far exceeds demand that producers accept paying penalties rather than shutting down their installations. For solar, whose marginal costs are close to zero, the logic can hold in the short term. Over time, it erodes the financial viability of projects.
Official curtailment measures controlled curtailment, ordered by network operators. It does not capture energy not produced for lack of timely grid connection, nor hours when producers voluntarily reduce their injection to avoid negative prices. The total volume of losses is greater than what is counted.
The 2026 Netzpaket reallocates risk without solving the bottleneck
Facing this mounting saturation, the federal government presented the 2026 Netzpaket. The central idea: producers located in areas where the network is saturated must assume a larger share of the financial risk linked to their curtailments. The stated objective is to align market signals with the physical reality of the network, to avoid encouraging installation where lines cannot keep up.
The economic logic is defensible. If a producer knows he will be partially exposed to curtailment costs, he has an incentive to choose better-connected sites or invest in local storage. Price signals would partly replace administrative planning.
The problem is that network saturation affects certain regions of the country. Adjusting rules based on network saturation by zone can direct investment toward better-connected sites. Germany would end up under-exploiting its best solar potential in order to spare a network it should have reinforced earlier.
During consultations, producer organizations expressed reservations: the 2026 Netzpaket transfers risk without immediately creating capacity. Missing lines will not be built faster because solar investors receive one more penalty. The network will remain saturated.
Network expansion: a necessity that runs up against a decade of delays
Expansion of the transmission network is the obvious structural response. Germany has known this since at least 2015, when the first federal plan including SuedLink was adopted in 2013; reforms to north-south lines followed. A decade later, major projects, SuedLink, SuedOstLink, still face delays of several years. Authorization procedures, legal challenges, land negotiations: each kilometer of high-voltage line takes on average seven to ten years between decision and commissioning.
The network is a major bottleneck among several structural constraints on the transition. An acceleration decision made today will produce effects before 2030 for projects already underway according to official schedules: A-Nord is planned for 2027, SuedLink for 2028; new projects may emerge before 2030, but a significant portion of structural reinforcements is planned for the 2030s and beyond. The power grid has become the central issue of the global energy transition, and Germany offers its most well-documented illustration: the constraint is largely institutional and temporal, but it also includes technical, industrial, and operational dimensions.
At the European level, the European Commission mentions needs of 477 billion euros for transmission networks by 2040. The German plan envisioned roughly 50 billion euros in investments in electrical networks by 2030, with no additional figures under REPowerEU. This amount remains hypothetical as long as joint financing mechanisms are not settled.
Member States are advancing at their own pace. Coordination of cross-border projects, particularly useful for balancing one country’s surpluses with another’s deficits, remains laborious.
Distributed storage: slower to deploy, less socially contested
Facing delays in network expansion, distributed storage imposes itself as a partial alternative. Residential, community, or rooftop-mounted batteries can absorb local surplus and release it a few hours later, when demand picks up and the sun sets.
Germany is already one of Europe’s most active markets for residential batteries. Hundreds of thousands of households have paired their solar installation with a battery. But at system scale, the volume remains limited to absorb saturation during peak hours. A 10 kWh battery in a Bavarian home absorbs that home’s surplus, not that of a 50 MW solar park five kilometers away.
Large-scale storage on the parks themselves is rolling out but slowly. The cost of lithium batteries has fallen more than 80 percent over ten years, which makes projects economically viable in certain configurations, particularly when negative prices are frequent and the producer can arbitrate between free injection and delayed sale. Bundesnetzagentur data on negative-price episodes in H1 2026 suggest this model is gaining relevance.
An intra-day flexibility market that would pay producers able to curtail or store on demand would accelerate this deployment. Germany already has the basic regulatory instruments; extending them to small producers and community batteries is under discussion within the framework of the 2026 Netzpaket.
Grid connection delays and their consequences for the decade ahead
The signals to watch for evaluating which trajectory Germany takes are precise and measurable. The quarterly volume of renewable curtailment, published by the Bundesnetzagentur, will say whether the trend accelerates or stabilizes. Grid connection delays by zone will say whether procedures are improving. Announced versus realized transmission investments will say whether promises translate into steel and cables.
The most likely short-term trajectory, absent change, combines three factors: the 2026 Netzpaket modifies investment conditions in saturated zones, curtailed electricity volumes vary by year and quarter, and gas and coal remain as backup to ensure network stability. This trajectory is not inevitable, but it must be stated clearly to be avoided.
The trajectory of prioritized network expansion depends on a political decision Germany has not yet made: to simplify and accelerate authorization procedures, even at the cost of social acceptance that current consultations do not naturally obtain. Several Nordic countries have shown that four- to five-year timeframes are achievable with reformed procedures; the gap with Germany’s ten years is institutional, not technical. As in other sectors where Germany adapts its industrial fabric, the speed of adaptation depends less on capacity to innovate than on capacity to reform the framework in which innovation operates.
The trajectory of distributed storage is slower but politically less resistant. It does not require running lines through forests with high-voltage cables. It requires clear market signals, visible negative prices, remuneration of flexibility, and harmonized connection standards at European scale so that community batteries can participate in balancing markets. Alternative fuels in aviation face the same structural blockage: technology advances, regulatory frameworks and transport infrastructure delay.
Price signals as a lever to orient investment
The fundamental question posed by the 2026 Netzpaket is real, even if the proposed answer is imperfect: how do you direct solar investment toward places where the network can absorb it, or toward configurations that compensate for its weakness?
A functioning intra-day flexibility market would partly answer this question. If a solar producer in a saturated zone can be paid to store rather than inject at peak hours, he has an incentive to combine his park with batteries. Price signals replace regulatory constraint and create positive incentive. Curtailment ceases to be a dead loss and becomes a resource to be managed.
Common connection standards across the European Union would allow producers to know, before investing, what constraints apply to their zone and how to compensate for them. The absence of these standards currently creates regulatory uncertainty that slows investment decisions and favors projects in already well-connected zones, at the expense of areas with maximum potential.
Germany possesses the intellectual and institutional tools to advance on both fronts. Fraunhofer ISE documents data with quarterly precision that allows decision-makers to measure the effects of each adjustment. The Bundesnetzagentur publishes emergency interventions, curtailment volumes, negative prices. The diagnosis is there. What is missing is execution speed, and perhaps the conviction that missing the connection of a gigawatt-hour of renewables is as serious as missing a megawatt of installation.
128 GW target for 2026, 19.6 GW on average per year to reach 215 GW by 2030, 1.412 TWh of redispatch in the first half of 2026: the solar objectives and the redispatch attest to a network-production synchronization challenge. Germany has six years to decide whether it builds the lines, deploys the batteries, or accepts wasting a growing portion of what it installs.
Sources
- Fraunhofer ISE, Recent Facts about Photovoltaics in Germany (May 2026)
- Bundesnetzagentur, Network data and emergency interventions H1 2026 (bundesnetzagentur.de)
- Destatis, Renewable energy statistics H1 2026 (destatis.de)
- Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate, Netzpaket 2026, network reform proposal (bmwk.bund.de)
