Electricity customers will likely have to pay higher fees for transmission in the intercity transport network next year. The four German transmission system operators 50Hertz, Amprion, Tennet and TransnetBW announced that the average network fee at the maximum and transformer levels will increase by 3.4 percent to 6.65 cents per kilowatt hour. For household customers with an annual consumption of 3,500 kilowatt hours, the increase would mean an additional burden of around 7.70 euros.
A main reason for the increase is increased costs for so-called bottleneck management, which helps prevent line overloads. “This cost block alone now accounts for over 50 percent of network fees,” emphasized the network operators. The second factor is the investments in network expansion. “These are essential, in particular in order to expand and convert the network to make it climate-neutral Energy supply to move forward.” The fees are uniform nationwide. The network operators want to announce the final amount by the end of the year.
Network fees account for a good quarter of household electricity costs
The fees for the transmission networks, also known as “electricity highways”, together with the fees for the regional distribution networks (high-voltage, medium-voltage, low-voltage), form the network fees cost block on end customers’ electricity bills. According to an analysis by the Federal Association of the Energy and Water Industry (BDEW), the total network fees including measurement and measuring point operation accounted for almost 28 percent of the total electricity price for average households in July.
The four companies assume that the costs for network reserves and congestion management will decrease as network expansion progresses. In order to cushion the burden on the economy and consumers, they continue to advocate stabilizing network charges. “One possibility is to separate the costs arising in the transformation phase, for example for network reserves and congestion management, from the network fees and instead finance them with funds from the federal budget.”
The electricity transmission network in Germany is almost 39,000 kilometers long. The electricity distribution network with the voltage levels below it has a total length of around 1.9 million kilometers.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:241001-930-248498/1
Electricity customers will likely have to pay higher fees for transmission in the intercity transport network next year. The four German transmission system operators 50Hertz, Amprion, Tennet and TransnetBW announced that the average network fee at the maximum and transformer levels will increase by 3.4 percent to 6.65 cents per kilowatt hour. For household customers with an annual consumption of 3,500 kilowatt hours, the increase would mean an additional burden of around 7.70 euros.
A main reason for the increase is increased costs for so-called bottleneck management, which helps prevent line overloads. “This cost block alone now accounts for over 50 percent of network fees,” emphasized the network operators. The second factor is the investments in network expansion. “These are essential, in particular in order to expand and convert the network to make it climate-neutral Energy supply to move forward.” The fees are uniform nationwide. The network operators want to announce the final amount by the end of the year.
