Germany moves to end guaranteed payment for new rooftop solar and push the smallest systems into the market, with a first reading on 24 September

The German federal government introduced its rewrite of the Renewable Energy Sources Act into the Bundestag on 10 September 2026 as Drucksache 21/7867. The bill is listed for its first reading on Thursday 24 September 2026, with twenty five minutes of debate allotted to it and a further twenty five minutes to a separate grid package immediately afterwards. The timetable is tight by design: state aid approval for substantial parts of the current law expires at the end of this year, the replacement is meant to take effect on 1 January 2027, and the Bundestag is working to pass it by the end of October so that the Bundesrat can act before the deadline.

What the bill does to small rooftop solar is the part worth reading closely.

Fixed feed in payment for new installations is abolished. Systems of 25 kW and below, which is to say almost every domestic roof in Germany, keep a fixed rate only until the end of 2028. The rate itself falls to 5.2 cents per kilowatt hour, and it is paid for three years rather than the twenty years that has been the settled expectation since the law was first written. New small solar generators are moved to compulsory direct marketing, as are installations above 100 kW, with larger plant operating under two sided contracts for difference. A separate provision cuts redispatch compensation: an operator who builds in a congested part of the grid forfeits payment for between 18 and 20 per cent of annual output, for up to six years. The onshore wind target is set at 115 GW by 2030.

A feed in tariff is often described as a subsidy, which understates what it actually sells. What it sells is predictability. It tells a household what twenty years of a south facing roof is worth before anyone signs a contract for the roof, and that single number is what makes a rooftop installation financeable by a person rather than by an institution. Replacing twenty years of a known rate with three years of 5.2 cents, and then requiring the owner to sell the output into a market, moves both the price risk and the administrative work from the utility back onto the owner of the asset.

This matters beyond Germany because Germany is the control case. It has the largest prosumer base in Europe, and it built that base on precisely the arrangement now being withdrawn. Every jurisdiction that has copied the German model, including several Indian states, has copied the guarantee along with it. What happens to installation rates in 2027 is the closest thing anyone will get to a natural experiment on whether distributed ownership is durable once the guarantee behind it is removed, or whether the guarantee was the whole of it.

The compulsory direct marketing requirement deserves its own scrutiny. Direct marketing is a wholesale market activity. It assumes a party that can forecast output, submit schedules, and bear imbalance costs. A household with a 9 kW roof can do none of these things and will therefore contract with an aggregator, which is a reasonable outcome if aggregators compete for small customers and a poor one if they do not. The bill as summarised does not appear to oblige any aggregator to accept a small customer, and it does not cap what one may charge. That is the mechanism by which a rule framed as market participation can end up concentrating the market rather than opening it, and it is the thing to watch in committee.

The redispatch clause is the quieter half. Forfeiting compensation for a fifth of annual output in congested areas is a way of pricing grid scarcity without building anything, and it pushes the cost of a network built for a different topology onto whoever builds nearest to the constraint. Whether that is fair depends entirely on how the congested areas are drawn and how often the map is revised, neither of which is settled in the material available.

One widely repeated claim about this bill could not be confirmed and is flagged rather than reported. Industry briefings and German consumer guidance describe a permanent cap limiting active power feed in from building mounted solar below 100 kW to 50 per cent of installed capacity, in a new section 9 (2b), applying to systems commissioned from 1 January 2027, with exemptions for plug in devices up to 2 kW and for zero feed in systems. A Taylor Wessing note from March 2026 describes it in an earlier draft, and consumer guidance attributes it to the cabinet draft of 29 July 2026. It does not appear in the Bundestag's own summary of the bill as introduced, and it was not checked against the text of Drucksache 21/7867. It is also the provision the solar industry has objected to most loudly. A claim that is both the loudest and the least confirmed should not be reported as fact, and it is not reported as fact here.

The industry reaction currently circulating in English comes from an opinion column published by pv magazine on 18 September 2026 and written by Martin Schachinger of pvXchange, who warns of a wave of closures and names Enerparc and RCT Power as companies already in distress. That is commentary from an interested party rather than a filing, and it is cited here as reaction rather than as evidence of what the bill will do.

The first reading on 24 September is a debate, not a decision. Nothing is settled until the committee stage, and the schedule leaves roughly five weeks for a bill that changes the economics of every new roof in the country.