Evil low-cost providers? Habeck wants to prevent the return of energy discounters
Speculation on “perpetually low prices” on the electricity exchange is “not a resilient business model”, criticizes Economics Minister Robert Habeck
Quelle: Getty Images
Economics Minister Habeck is reacting to the series of bankruptcies among low-cost providers in view of the rise in energy prices. Customers who are willing to switch should not have to foot the bill for the dubious behavior of the company. Bad suspicion falls on some managers.
BEconomics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) wants to regulate the end customer market for electricity and gas more strictly after the bankruptcy series among energy discounters. Consumers who are willing to switch and who involuntarily slip into extremely expensive alternative supply tariffs after their low-cost provider stops delivery should be better protected, said Habeck at the “Handelsblatt” energy summit in Berlin.
“The fact that people in good faith that they have received a cheap offer now find themselves in the more expensive basic service tariff cannot simply remain without consequences,” said Habeck. For some of those affected, the consequences are associated with enormous social hardship. It must be prevented “that the people who want to save 50 euros end up being cheated”. He wanted to have it checked how the electricity and gas market could be regulated in the future.
Habeck sees the blame for the misery solely in the business practices of some low-cost providers of electricity and gas. The customers are not to be blamed. Numerous sales companies had acted on the energy market with short-term procurement contracts and were thus able to make unbeatable price offers for a long time. After the procurement prices for electricity and gas had quadrupled in just a few months, the discounters suddenly shied away from these costs and unilaterally stopped supplying their customers.
Such speculation on “perpetually low prices” on the electricity exchange is “not a resilient business model,” Habeck criticized. “The long-term deposit must be regulated more clearly,” said the Federal Minister of Economics. This could mean that energy distributors will in future be forced to secure part of their delivery obligations with long-term procurement contracts. However, this would make extremely cheap offers on the energy market impossible in the future.
Consumer lawyers consider the unilateral contract termination by the low-cost provider to be illegal. For the time being, however, this does not change the legal consequences: According to the law, the dominant energy supplier in the region must step in and take over the supply as the “default supplier”.
Since the default suppliers have to buy electricity and gas on the exchange at extremely high costs for the unwanted new customers at short notice, this represents a high financial burden Ex-customers of discounters fell.
The CEO of the energy company E.on, Leonhard Birnbaum, spoke of a regulatory failure by the authorities. “We had a number of market participants who shouldn’t have existed.” Worse experiences with dubious low-cost providers are otherwise only found on the British energy market. There are only twelve left because of the suddenly increased procurement costs of 47 low-cost providers, the rest are insolvent.
The question arises as to whether some cases also involve bankruptcy fraud, said Birnbaum. This could be the case, for example, if low-cost providers terminate their less lucrative private customer contracts, only to be able to sell their then free gas and electricity contracts many times more expensive on the currently completely overheated spot market. However, since such transactions are handled via brokers in case of doubt, it is difficult to find evidence of this. The E.on boss also called for better regulation of the market: “There must be no more speculation about advance payments from customers on the wholesale market.”
Record price of 1.07 euros per kilowatt hour causes criticism
The task of the energy discounters had also triggered a dispute between the consumer centers and some municipal utilities. Because in view of the new customer avalanche and the associated procurement costs for energy, some local suppliers had introduced special “new customer tariffs”. The existing customers in the basic tariffs should not be burdened by the costs of the discounter bankruptcy, so the calculation. With a new customer price of 1.07 euros per kilowatt hour – more than three times the basic tariff – the Pforzheim public utility company, among others, had triggered the criticism of consumer protection groups. Some lawyers also considered it inadmissible to split the basic service tariff into a price for existing customers and a price for new customers.
In the meantime, the state antitrust authorities have announced a price review procedure in the case of Stadtwerke Pforzheim. On Monday, Stadtwerke Pforzheim lowered its new customer tariff to 55.24 cents per kilowatt hour. Like its predecessor, this tariff is also based on the stock exchange price, the company explained.
“Everything on shares” is the daily stock exchange shot from the WELT business editorial team. Every morning from 7 a.m. with our financial journalists. For stock market experts and beginners. Subscribe to the podcast at Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music and Deezer. Or directly by RSS-Feed.
.