2023-10-13 17:57:26
The price of electricity for consumers in Germany has recently fallen slightly. According to figures from the Internet portal Verivox, which continuously compares the prices of so-called basic suppliers as well as cheaper alternative providers, consumers paid an average of 38.55 cents per kilowatt hour in October. In September it was 39.22 cents.
The prices are currently slightly below the state electricity price cap of 40 cents per kilowatt hour. This cap was introduced for the price of 80 percent of a household’s previous year’s consumption – so it is not absolutely necessary that the average price has to be below the cap.
The electricity price cap came into force retroactively in March for the months of January and February. The original idea was to allow the price caps to apply until April 2024. However, only a period until the end of this year was written into the law. The coalition now wants to extend it until Easter, i.e. the end of March. But for this she still needs the approval of the EU.
In return, she wants to end the reduction in VAT earlier. In the wake of the energy crisis, the VAT on electricity was temporarily reduced from 19 to 7 percent. This reduction was actually supposed to apply until March 2024 – but is expected to expire at the end of the year.
Not just a consequence of the political price cap
In any case, the fact that electricity has become somewhat cheaper again for consumers is not simply a result of the price cap. “It should be noted that wholesale prices for electricity and gas fell in 2023 on the short and long-term markets compared to 2022 – this development is also reflected in the end customer prices,” said a spokesman for the Federal Network Agency when asked.
“Especially at the beginning of the year, when electricity prices rose from record to record due to sharp increases in procurement costs, the government cap slowed down electricity costs significantly in some cases,” says Lundquist Neubauer from Verivox. In January 2023, 4,000 kilowatt hours of electricity would have cost an average of 1,928 euros without the price brake – with the price brake, the annual costs fell by 8 percent to 1,778 euros in purely mathematical terms. “New tariffs are now well below the electricity price brake across the board, so the relief effect for an average household is small,” says Neubauer:
In the past twelve months, the average electricity price for consumers in the Verivox statistics has at times been significantly higher than it is now: in October last year it was 53.83 cents per kilowatt hour, in January of this year it was 48.20 cents and in July at 39.94 cents.
Various factors affect electricity
There are various effects that overlap each other; Both market forces and political decisions influence the price of electricity. In July of last year, the EEG levy to promote green electricity was abolished. “At that point, the abolition of the EEG levy had at best a price-dampening effect, because at the same time high procurement costs drove up the price of electricity,” says Neubauer. But that has now changed.
In contrast, the so-called network fees for using the network have increased by around 17 percent since 2022, explains Trottner: “The network usage fees already account for around a quarter of the total net electricity price of an example family.”
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The fight for climate protection also tends to make electricity more expensive. Unlike fuel or heating oil, the national CO2 price is not directly charged for electricity. But European emissions trading for coal and gas has an impact. Trottner says: “Since gas power plants are currently essential in the German electricity mix in order to balance out fluctuating renewable energies, the price of electricity also changes along with the price of gas, influenced by emissions trading.”
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