This paper discusses the efficiency of promotion schemes for renewable energy sources using the example of onshore wind energy in Germany. We analyse whether the scheme incentivised a cost-minimal capacity build-up by developing a model to derive two cost-minimal benchmark scenarios, which are then compared to the historical capacity build-up between 1995 and 2015. The costs of the two cost-minimising benchmark scenarios are significantly lower than those of the historical build-up. The benchmark cost reduction largely stems from greater efficiency—fewer turbines are being constructed overall but they are being placed at better wind sites so the annual production of wind energy remains unchanged. Hence, aggregated turbine land use is also significantly down in these scenarios. Furthermore, we compare costs for consumers, as protecting consumers from price discrimination of producers is sometimes used to justify higher payments for low-wind sites. However, our results show that the efficiency gain from building at high wind sites outweighs the distributional effect, even from a consumer’s perspective.

本文以德国陆上风能为例，讨论了可再生能源推广计划的效率。我们通过开发一个模型来推导两个成本最小的基准方案，来分析该计划是否激励了成本最小的能力构建，然后将其与1995年至2015年的历史容量构建进行比较。这两个成本的成本分别为最小化基准方案远低于历史累积方案。基准成本的降低主要源于更高的效率-整体上建造的涡轮机数量减少，但它们放置在风能较好的地方，因此风能的年产量保持不变。因此，在这些情况下，涡轮机土地的总使用量也显着下降。此外，我们比较了消费者的费用，因为保护消费者免受生产者价格歧视的影响，有时被用来证明为低风场支付更高的费用是合理的。但是，我们的结果表明，即使从消费者的角度来看，在高风场建造建筑物所产生的效率收益也要大于分配效应。