According to the comparison portal Verivox, private households in Germany are paying more than five billion euros too much this year due to a lack of willingness to change electricity providers. Almost a quarter of households in Germany still receive electricity via the local supplier’s basic supply tariff – by far the most expensive tariff group. Because these approximately ten million households neither care about changing electricity providers nor about a cheaper tariff from their previous provider, they are paying almost 5.5 billion euros too much extrapolated to this year, as Verivox further announced on Sunday in Heidelberg. According to the information, all households that do not look for a cheaper offer when building a house or moving in receive the basic supply tariff from the local electricity supplier.
A kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity in the basic supply tariff currently costs 44.36 cents on average across Germany. In the cheapest available tariff with a price guarantee, the national average price is currently 24.7 cents/kWh. In 2022, around 27.9 billion kilowatt hours of electricity were delivered to households as a basic supply, writes Verivox, referring to the current monitoring report from the Federal Network Agency. Based on this consumption volume, basic supply customers will reportedly pay around 12.4 billion euros for electricity in 2024. In contrast, the cheapest tariff would only incur electricity costs of 6.9 billion euros, which corresponds to savings of around 5.5 billion euros. “It is astonishing that almost a quarter of electricity customers voluntarily remain on the most expensive tariff,” said Thorsten Storck, energy expert at Verivox.