The month-long billing chaos at Stadtwerke München (SWM) was not only annoying for its customers, it also cost the company itself dearly: According to its own statements, SWM lost at least ten million euros as a result.
The reason: Because it took so long until the advance payments from hundreds of thousands of households for electricity, gas and district heating were finally debited, the municipal utilities had to take out short-term loans in order to plug the interim financial hole. According to SWM, these “financing costs” amount to a “low double-digit million amount”.
From the Munich utility’s point of view, the energy price brake, which was decided in Berlin at the end of 2022, is to blame for the confusion. It was intended to cushion the massive inflation as a result of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and to relieve the burden on consumers. However, the bureaucratic processing was not carried out by state authorities, but by the respective companies, which, according to SWM, “were not prepared for such a task”.
According to their own information, the Munich public utilities have more than a million customers and around 200 different tariffs, all of which had to be reprogrammed – while the federal government continued to update the regulations: Changes to the ultimately two price brakes kept coming, and the final clarifications to the regulations were yet to be made will take place in October 2023. At this point, customers’ anger over the lack of advance payments had long since flared up.
The huge financial gap then had to be financed with new loans, according to the SWM. The question of what the delay in billing would cost was raised by city councilors Manuel Pretzl and Hans Theiss (both CSU) in July 2023. Like the advance payments themselves, the answer to them took a while. Only now have the SWM been able to answer the city council’s request.
The two CSU city councilors also wanted to know whether SWM customers could expect higher energy costs in the coming years in order to compensate for the losses. The public utility’s answer to this is: “no”. The company bears the costs itself.