The Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament, held the first reading of StromVKG on 11 June 2026 at 15:20 CET and, after a 30-minute debate, referred it to the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy under accelerated procedure1. StromVKG is the German gas-plant capacity law, a statute that pays for new gas-fired power plants the market alone will not fund. The cabinet had adopted the bill three days earlier.
The statute confirms two tender tranches: 4.5 GW auctioned on 8 September 2026 and a further 4.5 GW on 22 December 2026, with battery storage shut out of the first 9 GW on long-duration availability rules that favour gas-fired plant2. The exclusion runs through a dispatch-hour threshold batteries cannot meet, so the opening round is in effect a gas-plant subsidy. For a capacity-market trader that 9 GW is firm new thermal supply landing from the early 2030s, but only if the auctions hold their dates.
Alliance 90/The Greens opposed backing new fossil capacity without, in their phrasing, credible and ambitious hydrogen-conversion pathways, and demanded technology-neutral criteria as the price of support3. That is the same coalition-blocking dynamic that paralysed the prior 10 GW gas-plant law, when a coalition partner threatened to block a statute three years in preparation.
The binary to trade runs through the parliamentary timetable, not the politics. Second and third readings must clear before the 10 July summer recess for the September auction to hold. The Greens' conversion-pathway demand is a committee-stage lever, so if it lands as binding amendments the readings slip and the first auction moves with them. It reads straight through to forward German capacity prices and to combined-cycle spark economics once the capacity payment is dated.
