Suedbonus

The Südbonus (literally 'southern bonus') is a regional capacity uplift mechanism in Germany's StromVKG electricity supply security law. It works by reducing the effective auction bid price for capacity plants located in a defined southern grid zone covering parts of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and North Rhine-Westphalia, giving those bids a ranking advantage in capacity tender auctions without paying them a higher subsidy rate directly. The design rationale is grid-technical: the southern German network faces structural congestion during periods of high load, and the capacity market aims to attract new dispatchable plants into those constrained areas.

The Südbonus applies to a maximum of two-thirds of total auction volume in each round, and the discount is set at approximately EUR 16,000 per reduced MW per year (EUR 16,000/rMW/a) on bid ranking. Critics argue the mechanism does not adequately account for the generation surpluses and industrial employment needs of East Germany, where coal-phase-out communities need replacement capacity but plants in those regions would not benefit from the Südbonus.

At the 24 June 2026 Wirtschaftsausschuss hearing on StromVKG, the Südbonus emerged as the law's single live amendment risk after the hearing produced no change to the 1 September first-auction date. IGBCE said the bonus disadvantages East Germany; the Bundeskartellamt had raised competition concerns earlier. Neither resulted in a formal committee amendment, leaving the Südbonus in the draft text as the principal unresolved fault line before the Bundestag summer recess. For desks pricing 11 GW of German dispatchable backup capacity, the Südbonus shapes where that capacity builds: a southern-biased auction outcome implies less new gas capacity in eastern Germany than a neutral mechanism would produce, concentrating future balancing supply in the south and west.