From the beginning of 2012, owners of German renewables assets have been paid a bonus on top of the feed-in tariff (FIT) for allowing private power-trading specialists to manage the electricity they produce, rather than simply pouring all the electricity into the local grid.

The idea behind the bonus was to take some of the burden off of Germany’s transmission system operators, which have less incentive to optimise the country’s increasingly volatile energy system, says Rasmus Vinge, head of renewables sales at Danske Commodities.

Instead,