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The Bundesnetzagentur has published the results of the innovation tender (Innovationsausschreibung) for the 1 May 2026 bid deadline, and the headline is structural rather than numerical. Of 46 bids totalling 749 MW, the regulator awarded 27 bids for 482 MW against a tendered volume of 475 MW. Every single awarded bid was a combination of solar and storage. The innovation route, designed to reward projects that pair generation with a system service, has in practice become a co-located solar-plus-storage product.
The volume-weighted average award value came in at 5.34 ct/kWh, with individual bids ranging from 4.75 to 5.61 ct/kWh. Bavaria took the largest share by a wide margin at 287 MW across 15 awards, followed by Schleswig-Holstein at 53 MW and Brandenburg at 51 MW.
The innovation tender pays a fixed market premium on top of merchant revenue rather than a sliding feed-in style top-up, and it requires the generation to be combined with another component, in this case storage. Developers have read that design and concluded that solar without a battery no longer competes here. With midday capture prices for solar eroding across German hours and negative price periods becoming a recurring feature of the shoulder months, the battery is what lets a project shift output away from the zero and sub-zero hours and defend its revenue.
The result is a tender that now functions as a price signal for co-located economics specifically. A 5.34 ct/kWh fixed premium, roughly 53.4 EUR/MWh, is the level at which the market is currently willing to build solar paired with storage under a subsidised route.
Standalone ground-mounted solar in Germany has been clearing its own tenders in the high 4s to high 5s per kWh, and merchant capture for unhedged solar has weakened as penetration rises. Against that backdrop, a co-located structure that earns a fixed premium and retains the flexibility value of the battery is doing two jobs at once: it locks a floor on the solar and it keeps the storage free to arbitrage spreads and sell flexibility.
That combination is exactly why hybrid structures are pulling ahead of solar-only ones in both the subsidised and the contracted route. The same logic that made every bid in this tender a solar-plus-storage bid is showing up in PPA negotiations, where buyers and sellers are increasingly pricing the battery as part of the package rather than bolting it on later.
For developers with solar pipeline in Germany, the read is direct. The innovation tender is now a storage-attached route, and entering it without a battery is close to a non-starter. For owners weighing the subsidised path against a PPA, the decision turns on how much the storage is worth as a merchant asset versus how much certainty the fixed premium buys, and that answer depends on the site, the grid connection, the cycling assumptions and the spread environment in the relevant bidding zone.
A national average cannot settle that for a specific asset. The variables that decide whether the innovation premium beats a hybrid PPA are local: capture profile, battery sizing and duration, the share of revenue assumed from arbitrage and ancillaries, and how negative-price exposure is handled.
Synertics models these route-to-market choices across the markets we cover, pricing the subsidised innovation path against transactable solar-plus-storage PPA structures for the individual asset. If you would like to see how the current award level compares with hybrid PPA pricing for a specific German project, please let us know.
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Insights, Market-trends, Announcements
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