Since 1 April 2026, Germany's four transmission system operators have allocated connection capacity by project maturity. First come, first served no longer applies on their grids. That changes who finds a piece of land valuable.

The procedure assesses applications in fixed cycles against four criteria, each weighted at 25 percent. Only applicants who submit an exclusivity declaration from the landowner are assessed at all. On top of that come an application fee of €50,000 and a realisation deposit of €1,500 per megawatt. Primary source checked

What matters is the difference between what earns points and what merely gets you in. Each of the four criteria breaks down into sub-criteria. The applicant's corporate substance earns zero points. Points go to securing land, permit status, the applicant's own substation, cable routing, creditworthiness and financing, sharing a connection with generation or storage and, with three of the 18 points, to orders already placed for transformers and switchgear. Entry takes the exclusivity declaration and the €50,000 fee. The balance sheet plays no part in that. Creditworthiness still counts, for three of the 18 points, but it no longer decides on its own.

Two caveats rarely get a mention. First, the procedure is the transmission operators' own concept and has no statutory basis. The operators themselves think the Federal Network Agency should confirm it and that it should be written into the Energy Industry Act (EnWG). Neither has happened yet. On 4 May 2026, a ruling chamber of the Federal Network Agency found that section 17 EnWG prescribes no particular procedure. A grid operator may therefore switch to a maturity procedure for capacity it has not yet allocated. Law-firm report on BK6-25-287; we have not seen the decision text Second, the procedure applies only to the extra-high-voltage grid. The distribution operators have not adopted it. Stromnetz Berlin ran a simulation of a maturity procedure, and it produced fewer allocations overall. Stromnetz Berlin therefore allocates connections above 3.5 megawatts pro rata. In its first round, about 365 megawatts were available against applications for about 2,300 megawatts. In all, 20 companies signed a contract with Stromnetz Berlin, including eleven data centres. ZfK, 4 May 2026 A site of 20 to 50 megawatts usually connects to the 110 kV grid and falls outside the procedure. It still waits in its distribution operator's queue, though, as soon as that operator requests capacity on the transmission grid itself. What follows from that is set out in Transmission or distribution grid?