Electricity and gas price brake: Relief is less than hoped for many households

The price brakes will come into effect on March 1, 2023.

This should reduce the costs for gas, district heating and electricity.

More and more customers are now receiving letters from the supplier - with disappointing news.

Berlin – On average, German consumers should be relieved by hundreds of euros with the electricity and gas price brakes.

According to a survey by the comparison portal

, the annual electricity costs for a single-family house fall by 216 euros on average in Germany, and gas costs by as much as 718 euros.

Most are looking forward to this relief, after all, energy costs rose by more than 20 percent last year.

But the discount will not go down for everyone – for many, the discount will be lower than hoped for.

Energy prices remain high despite price brakes

As the

reported last week, some consumers have received letters in which they are given relief amounts of just a few euros.

One person wrote that instead of a monthly electricity deduction of 90 euros, they now pay 89 euros.

Another electricity customer reports a “relief” of three euros a month.

But the electricity providers made no mistake.

The notifications only show how high the price brakes were actually set.

40 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity and 12 cents/kWh for gas are still very high amounts.

There are now new customer offers from electricity and gas providers who offer prices below these limits.

Electricity and gas price brakes: Why are the limits set so high?

But if the price brakes were intended to provide relief, why were they set so high in the first place?

To understand this, you have to look at the energy price curves of the past few months.

In the summer of 2021, before the price increases for electricity and gas began, new customers were usually offered prices between 25 and 30 cents/kWh for electricity.

In February 2022, just before the war in Ukraine began, the price for new customers was 35 to 40 cents/kWh.

The situation then came to a head in the summer of 2022: New customer offers for electricity reached record levels of up to 70 cents/kWh.

A similar curve was observed for gas: from 5 cents/kWh in summer 21 to 40 cents/kWh in summer 22 and now down again to around 11 or 12 cents/kWh.

The price brakes were designed in the summer and autumn of 2022, when energy prices had reached astronomical heights and consumers wanted to protect consumers from discounts of hundreds or even thousands of euros.

However, many consumers were able to benefit from the downturn again when adjusting their discounts towards the end of 2022 or early 2023 - so that the monthly payment amounts have increased, but not so much that they rush past the price brakes.

These consumers are now receiving the disappointing letters in which price discounts of just a few euros are booked.

Energy price relief: varies from state to state

The relief amounts are therefore highly individual: On the one hand, it depends on the electricity and gas provider and how cheap the contract is.

On the other hand, factors are also involved, such as when exactly the discount was last adjusted and what the forecasts for energy prices looked like at the time.

Finally, according to the comparison portal Verivox, the federal state also plays a role: consumers in the north-east are relieved more than in the south-west.

Households with an average gas consumption of 20,000 kWh/year in Berlin, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia benefit the most from the gas price brake with relief amounts of between 900 and 1,200 euros per year.

In Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, the amounts are between 140 and 500 euros the lowest.

The federal states of Schleswig-Holstein, Brandenburg and Thuringia will benefit most from the electricity price brake for households with an average annual consumption of 4,000 kWh/year.

In Bremen, Berlin and Hamburg, on the other hand, only a few euros flow to households from the electricity price brake.

Here you can see the average relief amounts for basic suppliers by federal state:

However, since the local basic suppliers do not always offer the cheapest energy tariffs, Verivox advises consumers who pay particularly high deductions to look around for other offers.