Gas prices: Customers have to pay for it – district of Munich

Anyone who finds mail from their energy supplier in their mailbox these days can literally dress warmly, especially if they heat their home with gas. An “adjustment of gas prices” is communicated to customers in the letter, and the bottom line is amounts in euros and cents that make them shiver. This also applies to the couple Viola and Wolfram Krautz, who live in a condominium in Ismaning and who will have to pay about four times as much for their gas consumption from November 1st – which is difficult for the two pensioners and which is why they think about heating and showering less .

They paid 1175 euros for the accounting year from October 2020 to September 2021, after that 1550 euros. In August of this year, they learned of a further adjustment as of October 1st, which would increase their annual bill to EUR 4,085 with the same consumption of 18,000 kilowatt hours per year. And that’s not all, the couple has now been informed that it will be even more expensive for them on November 1st if their energy supplier, Gasversorgung Ismaning GmbH (GVI), adds various state levies to the working price and they then pay almost 400 euros in the month for their gas consumption.

It will then cost 24.18 cents per kilowatt hour, down from the current 9.45 cents. “It really hurts now. For two pensioners who have worked all their lives, it’s bitter and difficult to cope with,” says Viola Krautz, who also wrote to Ismaning’s mayor Alexander Greulich (SPD) to explain her frustration background for the exponential increase in gas prices.

The supplier answers questions about conditions and supply contracts in very general terms

Because the GVI’s reasoning that the price explosions on the energy markets can be explained by the war in Ukraine and the increased distribution costs, they do not want to accept. On the contrary, she describes the reasons as “extremely questionable”. The suspicion arises that GVI has failed to conclude long-term, favorable supply contracts with the buyer “and that end customers like us now have to bear the brunt of it”.

Other gas suppliers such as Stadtwerke München are obviously more careful, at least as far as existing customers are concerned. “We would like to know exactly from whom GVI obtains the gas and which supply contracts with which conditions and deadlines have existed or currently exist,” the couple told the mayor.

Alexander Greulich, who is chairman of the GVI supervisory board, forwarded the couple’s complaint to GVI managing director Franz-Josef Loscar, with whom Viola Krautz had already had a “very nice” phone call, in his own words. “But I wasn’t 100 percent satisfied afterwards,” she says.

Has around 2000 customers: Franz-Josef Loscar has been in charge of the Ismaning municipal works since January 2017.

(Photo: Patricia Lang)

Energy suppliers are generally not too willing to talk about their supply contracts and conditions. According to its boss Loscar, GVI has an upstream supplier, which can be a purchasing group, an individual dealer or the Munich public utility company. In his own words, Loscar understands the problem of his gas customers – currently around 2000 – well. “Every customer has the opportunity to say that it is too expensive for him and that he is changing providers,” says Loscar and continues: “The current problem is that there are no more providers. If so, then maybe two or three of the 50 so far .”

In his own words, Loscar would be very happy if Berlin finally got clarity on the gas levy, which has been controversial for weeks. The managing director describes a gas price cap, which has recently been discussed as an alternative, as a double-edged sword. It is only said that the end customers would have to pay less as a result, but not how the gas companies should deal with their losses.

They are now running into the booth of the energy agency. Only the consultants are missing

In addition to the Ismaninger municipal utilities, the Haar municipal utilities also play a role as the second local gas supplier in the Munich district. They supply 11,000 local residents with electricity and 1,600 with gas. When it comes to energy supply, the people of Haar live on an island of the blessed. According to Rainer Mendel, the municipal utility has not increased energy prices once this year – as one of the very few energy providers in Germany. “We deliberately didn’t do that because we got large quantities cheaply,” reports Mendel. The municipality also does not speculate on the electricity exchange. Nevertheless: At the turn of the year, Haarer customers will also have to adjust to a price increase – “and it will be high,” announces Mendel.

Then the phones will probably stop ringing again at the Ebersberg-Munich energy agency, where, according to press spokesman Benjamin Hahn, inquiries have recently increased massively: from the feeling since 2021 by three to four times. Which poses a problem for the energy agency because it lacks enough consultants. As compensation, free online collective advice is offered with experts, also on YouTube. “We’ve noticed that many people are worried that they won’t be able to pay the high energy prices any longer,” says Hahn. However, it is also noticeable that the mood towards renewable energies has improved significantly overall.

In 1996, when the retired Krautz couple from Ismaning bought their condominium, they made a conscious decision in favor of a gas supply and the Ismaning municipal works as a public utility close to home. “We didn’t necessarily want the cheapest provider, but one we could trust,” says Viola Krautz, explaining the decision at the time. That trust is gone 26 years later.

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