Gas and electricity prices: Special pot for energy price cap requires less money than expected

2023-11-14 00:35:36

Around 70 billion euros more will be carried over into the coming year than expected for the gas and electricity price brake. The FDP and the Greens disagree about its use.

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Gas and electricity prices

Listen to the audio recording of the article here: Special pot for energy price cap requires less money than expected

PlayPause -00:00:00 0.5x 0.75x 1x 1.25x 1.5x 2x More about this audio offer The audio version of this article was artificially generated. We are constantly developing this offer and look forward to your feedback. The special pot for the gas and electricity price brake requires less money than expected. © Hauke-Christian Dittrich/​dpa

The special pot provided by the federal government with 200 billion euros in loans, for example to curb gas and electricity prices, requires far less money than expected. This emerges from the template for the final discussions on the 2024 budget, which the Finance Ministry sent to the Bundestag’s budget committee. According to the document available to the Reuters news agency, the government assumes that a good 103.7 billion euros will be carried over into the next year at the end of 2023. Originally it was assumed that there would be a remainder of around 32.8 billion. The reserve will be higher “due to the expected lower actual expenditure in 2023”.

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There is disagreement in the government about further use of the unused funds in 2024. Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) insists that loans not used for the purposes of the Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF) will expire. The Greens, however, want to use the money elsewhere. They wanted to use this to finance a subsidized industrial electricity price, but the coalition was unable to agree on this.

The special pot provided by the federal government with 200 billion euros in loans, for example to curb gas and electricity prices, requires far less money than expected. This emerges from the template for the final discussions on the 2024 budget, which the Finance Ministry sent to the Bundestag’s budget committee. According to the document available to the Reuters news agency, the government assumes that a good 103.7 billion euros will be carried over into the next year at the end of 2023. Originally it was assumed that there would be a remainder of around 32.8 billion. The reserve will be higher “due to the expected lower actual expenditure in 2023”.

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