LinkedIn·Tuesday, 4 August 2026·22d ago

For years, German regulation had one central goal: get renewable capacity built. Subsidies, feed-in support, incentives to add solar and…

Nina Waffenschmidt

CEO at PerPetum Energy

For years, German regulation had one central goal: get renewable capacity built. Subsidies, feed-in support, incentives to add solar and wind. It worked. And success brought its own effects: local grid congestion, surplus hours, and stretches of negative electricity prices. So the logic is shifting. The question is no longer only how much renewable capacity you add, but when you draw from and feed into the grid. Regulation is moving from rewarding generation to rewarding grid-supportive behavior: using power when the system has plenty, easing off when it is scarce. What I notice is that many industrial sites still optimise around fixed peak-load windows. That was the right answer to an older set of rules. Germany's atypische Netznutzung (§ 19(2) StromNEV) still works that way: shift consumption outside the grid's high-load windows, and network charges drop. That mechanism is now being reformed, and the future model for industrial consumers is still being designed. The principle behind it is not going away, though. It is getting broader. Because a battery lets a site do more than move around fixed windows. It can combine peak shaving and load shifting with responses to electricity prices, renewable availability and grid conditions. Not one window, but a continuous read of the system. That is the real shift: commercial value is moving from pure generation toward controllable flexibility. What strikes me is that the direction is clear even while the exact rules are still being rewritten. The systems that will do well are the ones built to respond to the grid, not just to produce for it. That is the shift I find genuinely interesting to watch, and to build for.