Renewable Energy
Commercial legal counsel guiding companies, investors and international groups through the development, structuring and delivery of wind, solar and storage projects in Germany and worldwide.
Legal support across the full project lifecycle, from development and finance through construction and operation to exit.
Legal support for international energy projects, for German companies expanding abroad and for international investors entering Germany.
German Companies Abroad
International Companies in Germany
We know where energy projects tend to break, and we move early on permitting, grid connection, finance and corporate structure so the project holds all the way to operation.
Permitting status, grid connection, subsidy eligibility and the contract framework are interlinked. We bring them into a coherent structure early, so later financing or sale processes do not stall on unresolved fundamentals.
Project companies, holding levels and finance agreements are set up to withstand due diligence and to fit into existing investor or group structures.
On cross-border ventures we coordinate local counsel centrally, keep contracts consistent across jurisdictions and protect the timeline from permitting and alignment loops.
Weak points in site control, PPAs, grid connection or corporate structure often surface late. We test them early, because this is exactly where financing and exit can tip.
We support you through structuring and delivery, from the first project idea to a successful close. Talk to us about your venture.
A Power Purchase Agreement is a long-term electricity offtake contract between generator and offtaker, often running ten years or more. The hardest-fought points are price and volume, the guarantees of origin, termination and adjustment rights, and the question of who carries grid and marketing risks. A PPA is never just a supply contract: in project finance, the bank reads it too, because it determines whether the project is bankable.
That depends on technology, site and procedure. Wind projects go through a permitting procedure under German immission control law, with expert reports on issues such as noise and species protection; solar projects usually run through land-use planning and a building permit. What holds a project up, however, is rarely the procedure itself. It is the incomplete documents, the unresolved land rights, the grid connection secured too late. These are exactly the points we clear before they become a bottleneck.
If a foreign investor acquires a stake in a German energy company or installation, investment screening under the German Foreign Trade and Payments Ordinance (AWV) can apply. Power generation and grids are considered security-relevant, so specific notification duties exist. The critical point is the timetable: a notifiable acquisition may only be completed once clearance has been granted. If this is addressed too late, the closing slips.
The German NIS2 implementation act has applied since December 2025, with no transition period. For the energy sector, special rules in the Energy Industry Act (EnWG) come on top of the BSI Act, and the Federal Network Agency and the BSI spell them out in the IT security catalogue. Requirements include risk management in line with the state of the art, reporting channels for security incidents, a secured supply chain, and registration, for which the deadline has already passed. Whether a business falls under the act at all is not always obvious; given the substantial fines, it pays to settle that question early.
In repowering, more powerful new turbines replace the old ones; in permitting terms, this has become noticeably simpler and faster. The real pitfalls lie elsewhere. The old land-use and easement agreements rarely fit the new turbines, because location, height and distances shift. The support and marketing regime changes, the dismantling of the old turbines needs to be agreed and secured, and municipal participation usually has to be renegotiated. In the end, the faster procedures only benefit those who sort out the contract and land side in time.
The German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) permits payments to host municipalities and expressly exempts them from criminal liability so that they do not count as granting an undue advantage; several federal states have turned this option into an obligation. In practice, municipal participation has long been part of the package anyway, as one of the levers for local acceptance and thus for the permit. The devil is in the contractual detail: who pays whom and when, what applies after a change of operator or after repowering, and how battery storage is treated, where the legal framework does not yet fit cleanly everywhere.
