PROFITABILITY OF GERMAN SOLAR POWER PLANTS

The recent revision of the German law on renewable energy (EEG) set ambitious expansion paths for the future domestic renewable energy generation and included technology specific target capacities. For non-roof mounted photovoltaic plants, these amount to a yearly expansion of 11GW. Using exemplary data provided by Vattenfall, this thesis calculates the profitability of agricultural land in the German region of Saxonia-Anhalt using scraped information on land leasing costs. Together with information on costs of technical components and assumed wholesale electricity price paths, it tries to answer the question if these expansion targets are feasible without further political aid such as subsidies