New tax regulation to ease storage deployment in Germany

The energy storage industry in Germany has been waiting for this for a long time. Mirroring the regulations applying to photovoltaic power plants and wind farms, 90% of the income from trade tax revenue should flow into the coffers of local communities. The remaining 10% then goes to the municipality in which the project operator is based.

A corresponding passage is now included in the “Annual Tax Act 2024,” the draft of which was approved by the cabinet on Wednesday. The annual tax law still has to go through the Bundestag before the regulation comes into force.

Eco Stor, one of the largest project storage developers in Germany, has been among those advocating for this change for a long time. “The localization of trade tax promotes structural change in rural regions and contributes to the acceptance of large infrastructure measures among the population,” said managing director Georg Gallmetzer.

Furthermore, the draft document states: “According to the current understanding of the tax administration, this already includes energy storage systems in the form of large battery storage systems that are fed exclusively with electricity from renewable energy systems (‘green energy storage’).

“However, the addition to the law is necessary because in the future it will no longer be ‘green energy storage’ but all energy storage systems that will play a crucial role in the integration of wind and solar power into the energy system. This also applies to ‘stand-alone’ storage systems that temporarily store electricity from the general supply network (i.e., also so-called ‘gray electricity’),” the draft continues.

According to the Federal Network Agency’s latest network development plan, large-scale storage systems with an output of around 24 GW should be installed by 2037; by 2045 it will be 43 GW – 54 GW. By May, large battery storage units with a total of 1.4 GW were recorded in the market master data register.