Published 11th Sept 2026
Germany's draft Netzpaket could penalize new solar and wind projects in areas with high curtailment, defined around the medium-voltage grid. Glint's new Mittelspannungsnetz layer makes it easy to see the grid, measure distance to it, and assess connection risk before committing a site.
Grid risk is not new, and it has never been free. Teams already pay for it in months spent on connection studies and applications, in offers that come back reduced or refused, and in curtailment eating the yield of projects that are already running.
Germany's Netzpaket adds a deduction taken straight off revenue, and it falls on whoever connects next in the wrong place. Under the draft, a grid operator can designate a capacity-constrained area, which the bill calls kapazitätslimitierte Netzgebiete. The area covers a substation and the line sections connecting it, where more than 5% of the generation behind it was curtailed the previous year. A new solar or wind plant that connects inside one gives up redispatch compensation on up to 20% of its annual output, for up to six years.
If the bill passes as drafted, the first designations could be notified to the Bundesnetzagentur by 31 March 2027, based on curtailment during 2026. That curtailment is recorded on the same network your pipeline is already applying to connect to, so a site secured before the designations land could sit inside one before it is energized.
Redispatch measures are published per power plant, and each plant can be located through the Marktstammdatenregister. But designation works at the level of a substation and the lines that connect it. To get from one to the other, you need to know which line each plant hangs off, and which substation that line feeds. That is the medium-voltage network, and it is not published as a map.
What exists instead are the Netzausbaupläne on VNBdigital: PDF maps, published by around 80 of Germany's 800-plus distribution operators, with quality that varies widely between them.
For most of Germany, the honest answer to "where is the medium-voltage grid?" has been: somewhere near here.
Rather than wait for the operators, we built the network ourselves. Mittelspannungsnetz is live for Germany as a layer in Glint with two sublayers you can toggle independently: network expansion plans, digitized from every Netzausbauplan published on VNBdigital, and lidar, the overhead lines we detected ourselves.
That second one is the new part. Overhead medium-voltage lines are physical objects suspended above open ground, which makes them visible to airborne laser scanning, and Germany has national LiDAR coverage. We processed it to detect those lines, then compared the result against everything the published plans contain.
Roughly 30,000 km of overhead line, about 19% more line length than the plans contain on their own, appears in no published plan at all. The same data let us correct the placement of lines we already had from the Netzausbaupläne, so the network is larger and sits closer to where it actually runs.
Toggling the two sublayers, lidar and network expansion plans, from national coverage down to individual feeders.
The Netzausbaupläne are the official source. OpenStreetMap is the other one most teams fall back on, and it is worth seeing the two against each other over the same ground.
Mittelspannungsnetz in Glint, combining the Netzausbaupläne with LiDAR-detected overhead lines, against the same extent in OpenStreetMap.
~30,000 km
of overhead medium-voltage line found that appears in no published plan
~19%
more overhead line length than the Netzausbaupläne contain on their own
824
operator territories with connection times and completion rates on the map
Two things are worth keeping in mind when you read the layer. The Netzausbaupläne cover both overhead and underground lines, but only where an operator publishes one, and they arrive as PDF maps whose precision varies between them. LiDAR picks up overhead lines wherever there is coverage, at survey precision, but underground cable does not show up at all, so the lidar sublayer is a picture of the overhead network rather than the whole medium-voltage grid.
How much it adds also varies by region. In some operator territories the plans were already good and it adds little; in others it changes the picture. It is worth looking at your own areas rather than reading across from a national figure.
The redispatch analysis is the reason we built this, but it is not the first thing it pays for. A better medium-voltage network changes decisions you are already making.
Distance to the nearest medium-voltage line is one of the first constraints most teams screen on, and it is only as good as the line it measures from. A line drawn a few hundred meters off, or missing from your data entirely, moves a connection cost estimate, changes a cable route, and can put the wrong parcel at the top of your outreach list. That is the kind of error that surfaces months later, after you have paid for it.
In practice this sits underneath the screening you already run: proximity to medium-voltage grid and private substations as constraints in Land Screening, then the detail once an area is worth pursuing.
The network reads better with the curtailment picture on top of it, so three things land with the layer.
That last one pairs with the rest more usefully than it sounds. Once you know where you can connect, it tells you how long it is likely to take.
Attributing curtailment through the network to individual substations is the next step. That is what would let you look at a site and see whether it sits behind a substation heading for designation. The network was the hard part of that problem, and it is in place.
Two things improve the picture from here. Operators must publish their 2026 Netzausbaupläne by 31 October, this time including smaller operators that curtailed more than 3%, and we add them as they land. And the more of the network we can corroborate from two independent sources, the more confident the attribution gets.
If you develop in Germany, the useful question is not whether these areas will exist. It is whether your pipeline is already sitting in one. Book a demo and we will put your projects on the network.
For the storage side of the same shift, read our guide to Germany's new rules for utility-scale BESS, and watch the pv magazine webinar on Netzengpässe and the EEG 2027.