Resilience Auctions for Net-Zero Technologies

"The use of resilience criteria in public tenders is an effective means of reducing strong dependencies on individual suppliers for critical green technologies," says cep technology expert André Wolf. However, in order to limit cost uncertainty and provide room for competition, they should be designed exclusively as award criteria and not as pre-qualification criteria. For greater accuracy, it is important to weigh resilience contributions of specific main components, emphasises the cep researcher.

For the example of support tenders for ground-mounted PV in Germany, the initial annual costs of resilience criteria are estimated at around 38 to 60 million euros. An evaluation phase with EU-wide pilot auctions should precede the implementation.

To increase their effectiveness, resilience criteria should be accompanied by EU-wide initiatives on the supply side. In particular, Wolf recommends joint efforts to overcome resource scarcity, the development of specialised industry clusters and a new focus on promoting ground-breaking innovations.