Electricity bills are likely to be lower for many households next year – thanks to falling network fees. But not all regions benefit from this.
Grid fees for electricity are likely to fall noticeably in the coming year. This emerges from the network operators’ preliminary price sheets published so far, which the energy data service provider Ene’t has evaluated. For private customers with low to medium consumption, network fees fall by an average of almost eight to a good ten percent compared to the current level.
So far only 30 of over 850 network operators have published their price sheets. According to Ene’t, these include many large area network operators, so that the network fees recorded so far cover more than two thirds of the federal territory. On average, network fees account for around a quarter of the total electricity costs for private households.
For a household with a consumption of 4,000 kilowatt hours – which corresponds to a family of four – the electricity network fees this year averaged a good 496 euros. According to previous price data, this average value for 2025 will fall by 10.3 percent to just under 445 euros. According to the data, network fees for commercial customers with a larger electricity requirement of 40,000 kilowatt hours per year fall even more, at a good 12.5 percent.
In August, the Federal Network Agency changed the regulations for charging network fees in order to better distribute the costs of the necessary network expansion as part of the expansion of renewable energies. Currently, the network fees in areas with a lot of wind and solar energy are sometimes significantly higher because the network expansion costs are passed on to the consumers there.
Ene’t’s evaluation shows that network fees actually fall sharply in areas with a lot of wind energy, such as in Schleswig-Holstein, or a lot of open-space photovoltaics, such as in rural Bavarian areas. However, price increases have so far been reported in the Palatinate or in urban areas in North Rhine-Westphalia. However, due to the incomplete data situation, it is not clear that the electricity grid fees will ultimately actually fall on a national average.