This Wednesday it is seven degrees in Wenzenbach in Upper Palatinate. Pretty warm for February, pretty icy for a cold shower. The residents of the Roither Berg district currently have to endure this every morning if they are inclined to personal hygiene. Around 70 households there have no longer had heating for almost a week. Why?
It all started with a price. This great start-up from Wenzenbach was celebrated as the “shaper of the energy transition”. It’s called EVW, and the idea sounded great. More than a hundred households were to be supplied with electricity by block power plants and they wanted to use the excess heat straight away. This is how the energy transition works! Or not. The electricity didn’t work, the company only makes money through the district heating network. And at prices that some residents didn’t agree with.
Homeowners and energy companies have been fighting in court for years. Now the EVW managing director complained about a “collective refusal to pay” and turned off the gas tap. And now? The short-term solution: thick socks and fan heaters. The long-term doesn’t exist yet. At least the community is helping out by offering residents to shower in the gym. She can’t do anything more because heating is not part of public services, but rather a private matter.
The situation is completely different in Ruhmannsfelden in the Bavarian Forest, where the community could have done something but unfortunately missed it. Here, too, it’s about something so obvious that you only notice when it’s missing: water. Ruhmannsfelden has always received this from three sources. But now an older woman came forward and demanded money because she owned the water rights for these three springs. I’m sorry, what? Can not be. This is how you have to imagine the reaction in the mayor’s office. And then the sheepish realization: Oops, that’s true. The water right automatically falls to the owner of the property on which the old town hall stands. The contracts date from the 1950s, when it was apparently impossible to imagine that the municipality would ever be able to sell its old town hall.
But she did it and apparently forgot to read the small print. The older lady who owns the water rights also seems to have only now noticed what vein of gold she is sitting on. Retroactively, she is demanding almost 170,000 euros from the community for the last 29 years; in the future she wants 15,000 a year. The mayor wants to talk first. There should be a round table. A short appeal in advance about the agreement that comes out of this: Please read it carefully!