The project was initiated by the Berlin-based consultancy eclareon GmbH. The development of the portal was funded by the German government. The operation of the web page is financed by user fees.
Biomasseatlas contains all biomass plants between 8 and 100 kW capacity in Germany that were funded by the MAP. We receive new data and update the database on a monthly basis. Biomasseatlas offers you to analyse the regional distribution of newly installed plants down to 5-digit post code level displayed according to plant type, capacity, sector of the economy, start-up date, funding amount and investment sum. The expert mode allows you to combine these data fields according to your individual needs. The queries can be displayed in a diagramme, table or map, and also be downloaded in the csv format for the use in Excel.
It should be kept in mind, that the database only contains plants that actually received the funding. In the past approx. 10% of the funding applications have been declined. As the conditions for approval of the applications have become more strict since June 2010, this share has increased to 25%.
Plant operators can apply for funding at the BAFA up to 6 months after start-up date of the plant. The handling duration of the BAFA can vary strongly. When the application is directly handed in complete, it might be processed within 2-3 weeks. Most of the plants (90%) will become visible in the system after 3 months, which means that the exact number of plants will only be displayed retroactive within the following months.
This means that the directly available data is not perfectly suitable for a very up-to-date market observation. We therefore offer our flatrate-customers to sign-in for the monthly newsletter which contains the evaluation of the new applications.
The plants in our database are allocated to the month of the start-up-date. The BAFA also publishes own (aggregated) statistics, which allocate the plants to the month of funding payment. As the processing of the applications takes some time, the funding payment will only be done several months after the start-up-date. As our data is displayed according to start-up-date, there is a difference to other statistics from the BAFA which are displayed according to the date of funding payment.