The President of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller, has complained that there is not enough competition in electricity and gas prices for household customers. In the comparison portals, he sees that there are significantly fewer offers compared to the last few years, said Müller at an event organized by the Association of Business Journalists on Monday evening in Düsseldorf.
“There are municipal utilities that only concentrate on their supply area, they have withdrawn from nationwide supply,” he complained. “It is important to discuss what we can do to ensure that more market players, more energy suppliers also make offers nationwide beyond their own district and that I as a consumer have a choice here.”
Müller: “modest experience” with changing providers
He doesn’t have a patent recipe. “I’m just offering you a description of the problem.” Many people have had a “modest experience” with a provider change in the last 18 months. In this context, he referred to numerous contract terminations by energy discounters.
The question arises: “Where are the competitive forces or the competitive players that will ensure that we will eventually see gas and electricity prices falling again?” There is no longer any authority in Germany that assumes this role.
Price supervision and approval have been abolished for good reasons and the Federal Network Agency is not at all keen on taking on such a task. “But if no authority does that, and at the same time consumers have possibly learned in the last 18 months that the person who switches is possibly the stupid one, then we have a situation in which we don’t have a reasonable competition model in the electricity and gas market currently have.” It is long overdue to “discuss how we ensure that we come to reasonable competitive pressure so that prices can eventually fall again.”
