Report: Industry avoided billions in EEG levy payments | Free press

by time news

Hamburg / Berlin (dpa) – According to a report by “Spiegel”, industrial groups in Germany have for years bypassed the EEG surcharge for green electricity subsidies and thus not paid billions to the state.

The other electricity customers, who would have had to pay correspondingly higher premiums, are the ones who suffered, writes “Spiegel”.

According to the report, a good two dozen well-known companies, energy suppliers and municipal utilities are involved. According to estimates, it is around eight to ten billion euros. It is currently being clarified in several court proceedings whether the practice was unlawful.

One case concerns the Bayer Group and its former subsidiary Currenta. In this case alone, according to “Spiegel”, there are repayments of up to one billion euros in the room. Because of the ongoing legal proceedings, a Bayer spokesman did not want to comment on Saturday when asked.

In the controversial practice, the companies are said to have used exception rules for electricity generated with their own power plants. Electricity generated and consumed by industry itself is exempt from the EEG surcharge, which currently accounts for around a fifth of the electricity price for end consumers. With the help of so-called slice leasing models, several large electricity consumers as operators would each have shared a power plant in order to be considered an electricity generator and benefit from the EEG exemption.

The news magazine relies on calculations by experts who had used the four major transmission system operators Amprion, Tennet, 50Hertz and TransnetBW. In 2019, they checked window lease models from around 300 industrial companies and criticized them in numerous cases.

The trigger for the exams was an amnesty regulation for disc lease models, which was introduced on January 1, 2017 due to the unclear legal situation. The lawmakers had granted those involved in these models under certain conditions protection of confidence for the past and the future, the network operators said at the time. In order to clarify whether the requirements for this amnesty regulation have been met, comprehensive legal reports have been commissioned.

When asked on Sunday, the Federal Ministry of Economics emphasized that the regulation had been passed by the Bundestag with a majority and would create legal peace. You draw a line under an electricity delivery model that has been legally assessed differently. “Due to the different legal opinions, it should be possible for companies to draw a line under the past.” In return, the companies now paid the full EEG surcharge.

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